Over the past two decades, global society has shifted significant portions of its social and economic activities online. In the US alone, Internet Association experts estimate that Internet-based commerce accounted for about $2.1 trillion, or 10% of GDP, in 2019. With this rise in economic and social activity, the world has witnessed a dramatic rise in cyber-attacks, mostly by criminal actors seeking to steal assets, defraud victims, and ransom decryption keys. One expert projects that by 2025, worldwide cyber-crime losses will reach a staggering $10.5 trillion, making cyber-crime—were it a country—the world’s third largest economy. For victims, the harm includes not only the cost of cleanup, but the loss of tangible assets such as stolen funds and fraudulent credit card charges, as well as harder-to-quantify figures for businesses that shut down operations or lose valuable intellectual property that finds its way into competitors’ hands. Thus, the consequences for business owners and everyday citizens are severe. Yet progress in stemming the flow of cyber-attacks in the US seems stymied. The White House’s 30-nation meeting on ransomware in October 2021 was a promising initiative, but lacked any mention of private-sector active defense measures. As noted in the 2016 "Into the Gray Zone" report co-authored by ADM Dennis Blair, one of this article’s authors, the US must take active steps not only to protect networks, but also to hunt down threat actors. Doing this at scale will require robust private sector participation. This article suggests one way to achieve this.
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