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Counterterrorism Expert: It's Time To Give Companies Offensive Cybercapabilities
itwbennett writes: Juan Zarate, the former deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism during President George W. Bush's administration says the U.S. government should should consider allowing businesses to develop 'tailored hack-back capabilities,' deputizing them to strike back against cyberattackers. The government could issue cyberwarrants, giving a private company license 'to protect its system, to go and destroy data that's been stolen or maybe even something more aggressive,' Zarate said Monday at a forum on economic and cyberespionage hosted by think tank the Hudson Institute.
This is a great idea. What on earth could possibly go wrong?!?! Lets give the power hungry, egotistical, anti-social network security "experts" who are in charge of creating the insecure networks the right to use "deadly force" against those they think might be responsible.
I can't wait for the fecal matter to hit the CPU fan when the wrong company is targeted for retaliation er I mean offense.
That hasn't worked too well with the NSA. I can't imagine that a private corporation with a financial incentive would be able to restrain themselves from attacking their competetors once they were given the go-ahead to start lashing out when their network gets DDOSd.
Look up "letters of marque and reprisal", and perhaps "privateering", too.
Yes and look deeper at history to see how badly that turned out. Law outside of the
law is not a solution.
The one missing executive order that could help internet security is that
all federal TLA class agencies report defects to vendors. Some will elect
to use a proxy... but defects are serious trouble and need to be squashed.
Follow that with failure to act legislation...
Of all the parts in Windows 10 the update policy may prove to be the
most important policy decision they made. Because the update is free
to the globe many bot systems will be eliminated. Perhaps millions of
compromised systems will be recovered.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
It wouldn't last a week before we'd be seeing attacks against competitors.
It's not competitors I'd be worried about but the copyright trolls. Using their interpretation of copyright law practically everyone would be guilty of "stealing" their data in some form or other and so would be open to be hacked "just to check". The truly ironic thing of course is that by acting under a letter of marque they would actually be far more like a pirate than those they accuse.