United States Ready For Offensive Cyber Attacks
The Pentagon has laid out its most explicit cyberwarfare policy to date, stating that if directed by the president, it will launch offensive cyber operations in response to hostile acts. Those hostile acts may include significant cyber attacks directed against the U.S. economy, government or military, Defense Department officials stated in a long-overdue report to Congress released late Monday.
First, the Department seeks to increase our attribution capabilities by supporting innovative research and development in both DoD and the private sector. This research focuses on two primary areas: developing new ways to trace the physical source of an attack, and seeking to assess the identity of the attacker via behavior-based algorithms. In the near future, the Department intends to expand and deploy applications that detect, track, and report malicious activities across all DoD networks and information systems on a near real-time basis. The ability to detect malicious activities quickly allows forensics experts to recover evidence during important windows of opportunity for attribution. Second, the Department has significantly improved its cyber forensics capabilities over the past several years. The Intelligence Community and U.S. Cyber Command continue to develop a highly skilled cadre of forensics experts.
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