August 22, 2023 — Whichever country successfully harnesses AI throughout its military first may obtain both a decisive advantage while also changing the character of war for future generations. Therefore, it is vital for the US to be the first to employ autonomous weapons systems in an operational environment. The Cyber Mission Forces have an urgent and operational need to augment its forces with autonomous and semi-autonomous cyberspace capabilities to meet its ever-expanding mission objectives. Exempting autonomous cyberspace capabilities in Department of Defense Directive (DODD) 3000.09 will (1) provide near-term benefits that avoid the path of a hollow Cyber force but (2) may create legal implications that could undermine the directive. MORE
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August 22, 2023 — How many personnel in the Department of Defense (DoD) can create and use com-puter code? Using what coding languages? How well? These are straightforward questions, but the answers are unknown, particularly to the personnel management system. The answers could also be a critical part of solving one of the DoD’s thorniest problems: filling the ranks of the US military’s cyber forces.
In an increasingly cyber-dependent and volatile world with fierce recruitment competition from the private sector, the DoD needs to be more creative in recruiting, training, and retaining cyber talent. To date, the primary focus of the DoD has been attracting cyber talent from outside. However, as the DoD is America’s largest employer with 2.91 million employees, it is essential that it also recruits internally to see if already hired personnel can fulfill DoD cyber talent needs.
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August 22, 2023 — Unchecked, proxy hacking attacks will further undermine the rule of law in cyberspace and increasingly threaten if not cause ir¬reparable harm to the international community. Unabated, proxy hacker attacks will spread disinformation, undermine public confidence in governments and diminish the ability of countries to maneuver freely in cyberspace.
The US should prioritize efforts to continue to defend forward and impose costs on proxy hackers and their supporters. Meanwhile, specific application of deterrence and compellence theories against proxy hacker efforts by Russia, combined with an effort to further develop international law and norms will help combat the problem. Over time, the use of proxy hackers may diminish under the pressure of such sustained efforts by the US and its partners.
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August 22, 2023 — In his introduction to the Fall 2022 issue of The Cyber Defense Review (CDR), COL Jeff Erickson, the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) director at the time, opened with, “The only constant in life is change,” a phrase credited to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. COL Erickson went on to relate this idea via a list of impactful changes that had occurred within the Army’s Cyber Community in the decade since the ACI’s founding in 2012. Three years earlier, the Secretary of Defense had directed the establishment of U.S. Cyber Command as a subordinate unified command under U.S. Strategic Command, followed in 2010 by the stand-up of the U.S. Army Cyber Command. COL Erickson recounted that during this period, “the Army was trying to figure out the best approach to address the uncertain environment and growing demand for deeper understanding” in cyberspace. In my estimate, the Army saw risk in the uncertainty and took action to address and mitigate that risk by directing the creation of the ACI at West Point. Internally, the creation of the ACI was carried out by members of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). MORE
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April 7, 2023 — Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake’s book The Fifth Domain: Defending our Country, our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats (2019) ex-plains “why raising the alarm on cyber threats is warranted, and… lays out a plan for how the worst outcomes can be avoided.” Both Clarke and Knake provide unique perspectives on potential cyber threats as both have served as members of multiple presidential administrations’ Department of Defense and Homeland Security staffs. Richard Clarke “drafted the first national strategy on cybersecurity that any nation ever published.” With a foundational understanding of cyber policy im¬plementation, both Clarke and Knake capitalize on their experience to create a superb¬ly-crafted plan to reinforce corporations' cyber readiness, increase governmental focus and impact on cyber security, develop lasting and successful cyber policies, increase personal cyber security, and share their perspectives on critically important issues like¬ly to surface in the near future. This review highlights Clarke and Knake’s key assertions about establishing lasting cyber peace, and their views on implementing the proposed segmented plan. MORE
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April 7, 2023 — China’s use of cyberspace is a significant threat to US relative power in an inherently dangerous and anarchic international system. Despite the clear threat, the US limits its own deterrent potential by maintaining a narrow view of cyberspace, applying a restrictive understanding of cyber attribution, and conceding to the influences of its own strategic culture. By prioritizing deterrence over other competing interests, while also adopting a broader view of the domain and a more stratified view of cyber attribution, the US can improve its ability to take the type of consistent, credible, and decisive action needed to deter China's aggression in cyberspace. MORE
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April 7, 2023 — Modern multi-domain battle involves not only physical threats like IEDs, but also, increasingly, cyber threats. The enemy may jam or intercept communication signals, or hack electronics including navigation systems and drones. Thus, all military lead¬ers - not just signal/cyber specialists - now require some awareness of tactical cyber resources and vulnerabilities. Physical threats come more readily to mind due to their frequency, and because their effects are so salient to the senses. Cyber threats have less historical precedence and are less ‘visible’ (“out of sight, out of mind”). We developed a task (Problem Anticipation Task: PAT) to gauge the degree to which future Army officers automatically anticipate cyber as well as non-cyber tactical threats. They read a hypothetical mission description and tried to anticipate up to 25 problems that could arise. The mission description explicitly mentioned several cyber-vulnerable components (e.g., radios, navigation systems, drones, biosensors). Yet 39% of these “digital native” participants failed to list a single cyber issue, and only 8% of anticipated issues were cyber-related. The PAT allowed us to assess a baseline regarding our readiness to anticipate cyber vulnerabilities, and can be used in future to assess the effectiveness of training interventions to raise cyber situation¬al understanding. MORE
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April 7, 2023 — The trope of future cybersecurity as a battle between warring artificial intelligences awaits the development of artificial general intelligence. In the interim, however, machine learning is being applied to several cybersecurity problem sets. This article looks more closely at how machine learning is transforming cybersecurity, considering the examples of authentication and masquerade, spam filtering and spam, antimalware and malware, and intrusion detection and intrusion. Machine learning is adding new capabilities for cyber defense and in most cases is useful in conjunction with other approaches. At present, machine learning applications for cyber offense remain primarily proofs of concept. MORE
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April 7, 2023 — On July 27, 2021, President Joe Biden warned, in a speech at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, that “I think it's more than likely we're going to end up, if we end up in a war - a real shooting war with a major power - it's going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence and it's increasing expo-nentially, the capabilities.”
Most analysts view the president’s hypothetical scenario as unlikely for two reasons. First, attributing cyberattacks is often challenging, making retaliation difficult, if not im¬possible. Cyberattacks are commonly anonymous, hard to trace, and may be triggered long after they were set up. Moreover, they are often carried out not by states but by criminal entities, hacker groups, or other non-state actors, which sometimes but not always are affiliated with or sponsored by states. The practical and political window for overt retalia¬tion closes if a cyberattack cannot be directly and timely attributed to a state. Second, and importantly, most cyberattacks do not have strategic effects. The preponderance of cyberat¬tacks are either distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks (meant to disrupt, blackmail, or extort), or they are efforts to collect information through a combination of hacking and malware. Even attacks attributable to a state usually fall below the threshold for conven¬tional retaliation.
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April 7, 2023 — Cyberspace has characteristics that differ from air, land, maritime, and space domains, which affect how the Joint Force operates and defends it. Fast-moving innovations are transforming the character of warfare in cyberspace, requiring novel technology in¬tegration. Effective integration of breakthrough technologies in autonomy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning into cyberspace can enable competitive advantages to be gained that enhance the combat power of joint forces conducting multi-domain operations. These technologies help shorten the sensor-to-shooter pathway to acceler¬ate and optimize decision-making processes. These technologies also permit the en¬hancement of cyber situational understanding from the ingest, fusion, synthesis, anal¬ysis, and visualization of big data from varied cyber data sources to enable decisive, warfighting information advantage via the display of key cyber terrain with relevance in the commander’s area of operations at the tactical edge. These technologies engen¬der actionable information and recommendations to optimize human-machine deci¬sion-making via autonomous active cyber defense to effectively execute command and control while informing resourcing decisions. Competitive advantages gained allow key actions to be taken to generate, preserve, and apply informational power against a relevant actor while also permitting maneuver through the information environment. MORE
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