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The Cyber Defense Review

 
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Conventional Retaliation and Cyber Attacks

By Sarah Chen and Dr. Jennifer Taw | April 07, 2023

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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 expo­nentially, 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 im­possible. 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 retalia­tion 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 cyberat­tacks 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 conven­tional retaliation.

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