U.S. Must Go on Offensive to Address Cybersecurity Issues

WASHINGTON, July 25, 2022 – The United States needs to adopt a more offensive cybersecurity posture to survive in an evolving digital world by enacting sanctions against malicious states, developing artificial intelligence capabilities to identify possible cyberthreats, and engaging in diplomacy to deter cyberattacks before they initiate, said experts at an Internet Governance Forum event on Thursday.

“The U.S. absolutely needs to bolster its response to malicious cyberactivity,” said Nazak Nikakhtar, a former assistant secretary for industry and analysis in the Commerce Department and current partner at law firm Wiley. “The United States is so far behind in addressing these threats.”

The United States is taking a defensive posture on cybersecurity by responding to threats as they come, said Nikakhtar. No one is talking about bettering our offensive capabilities in deterrence for malicious cyberattacks, she said.

Nikakhtar suggested enacting sanctions and penalties for violating privacy restrictions against hostile nation-states to deter cyber-attacks. She also suggested collaborating with allies to aggregate data to develop artificial intelligence that would identify possible cyberthreats. She called for think tanks and strategists around the world to come up with an offensive international strategy.

“I don’t think enough Americans are concerned about who has access to their data,” said Nikakhtar. “The aggregation of data by our adversaries, like China… is terrifying.” Our adversaries are finding out how they can weaponize our data and it should cause us to consider the risks and what we need to do to protect our data, she said. This follows Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine and an increase in cyberattack threats to the United States.

For example, experts say popular video-sharing application TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is required by Chinese law to comply with the Communist government’s surveillance demands. Nikakhtar — who was nominated for her Commerce role by former President Donald Trump, who himself wanted to ban TikTok over national security concerns — argued that there is “no alternative” to banning TikTok.

But John Morris of the Internet Society expressed concern that banning specific apps would encourage hostile nations to respond in kind by banning American apps, eliminating free exchange of information.

Meanwhile Eric Burger, research director at Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, suggested that the United States levy its diplomatic power by gaining political support from other countries to deter hostile nation-states from initiating cyberattacks. It is powerful to get a whole chunk of the world on our side regarding cyber war are, he said.

Google executives have previously called for the Department of Defense to continue making investments in AI to protect the cyberspace. “One of AI’s critical uses is finding anomalies in activity that would indicate a new threat vector,” said Andrew Moore, vice president and director of Google Cloud in a Senate subcommittee meeting on cybersecurity in May.