Much of the focus within academic and practitioner communities in the area of cyber deterrence has been on within-domain deterrence, and even studies of cross-domain deterrence have been largely concerned with the employment of noncyber instruments of power to deter cyberattacks. 41 Weapon Systems Cybersecurity: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities, GAO-19-128 (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2018), available at . 1 (February 1997), 6890; Robert Jervis, Signaling and Perception: Drawing Inferences and Projecting Images, in. Foreign Intelligence Entity (FIE) is defined in DoD Directive 5240.06 as "any known or suspected foreign organization, person, or group (public, private, or . A person who is knowledgeable in process equipment, networks, operating systems and software applications can use these and other electronic means to gain access to the CS. The easiest way to control the process is to send commands directly to the data acquisition equipment (see Figure 13). Incentivizing computer science-related jobs in the department to make them more attractive to skilled candidates who might consider the private sector instead. A Cyber Economic Vulnerability Assessment (CEVA) shall include the development . In addition to assessing fielded systems vulnerabilities, DOD should enforce cybersecurity requirements for systems that are in development early in the acquisition life cycle, ensuring they remain an essential part of the front end of this process and are not bolted on later.64 Doing so would essentially create a requirement for DOD to institutionalize a continuous assessment process of weapons systems cyber vulnerabilities and annually report on these vulnerabilities, thereby sustaining its momentum in implementing key initiatives. While the United States has ostensibly deterred strategic cyberattacks above the threshold of armed conflict, it has failed to create sufficient costs for adversaries below that threshold in a way that would shape adversary behavior in a desired direction.1 Effectively, this tide of malicious behavior represents a deterrence failure for strategic cyber campaigns below the use-of-force threshold; threat actors have not been dissuaded from these types of campaigns because they have not perceived that the costs or risks of conducting them outweigh the benefits.2 This breakdown has led to systemic and pervasive efforts by adversaries to leverage U.S. vulnerabilities and its large attack surface in cyberspace to conduct intellectual property theftincluding critical national security intellectual propertyat scale, use cyberspace in support of information operations that undermine Americas democratic institutions, and hold at risk the critical infrastructure that sustains the U.S. economy, national security, and way of life. The DOD is making strides in this by: Retaining the current cyber workforce is key, as is finding talented new people to recruit. George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), 147157; and Justin Sherman, How the U.S. Can Prevent the Next Cyber 9/11, Wired, August 6, 2020, available at . The objective of this audit was to determine whether DoD Components took action to update cybersecurity requirements for weapon systems in the Operations and Support (O&S) phase of the acquisition life cycle, based on publicly acknowledged or known cybersecurity threats and intelligence-based cybersecurity threats. Its worth noting, however, that ransomware insurance can have certain limitations contractors should be aware of. The Pentagon's concerns are not limited to DoD systems. Troops have to increasingly worry about cyberattacks while still achieving their missions, so the DOD needs to make processes more flexible. JFQ. Failure to proactively and systematically address cyber threats and vulnerabilities to critical weapons systems, and to the DOD enterprise, has deleterious implications for the U.S. ability to deter war, or fight and win if deterrence fails. A telematics system is tightly integrated with other systems in a vehicle and provides a number of functions for the user. Cyber vulnerabilities in the private sector pose a serious threat to national security, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines a vulnerability as a "weakness in an information system, system security procedures, internal controls, or implementation that could be exploited or triggered by a threat source." Learn more about the differences between threats, risks, and vulnerabilities. (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, June 8, 2018), The term blue cyberspace denotes areas in cyberspace protected by [the United States], its mission partners, and other areas DOD may be ordered to protect, while red cyberspace refers to those portions of cyberspace owned or controlled by an adversary or enemy. Finally, all cyberspace that does not meet the description of either blue or red is referred to as gray cyberspace (I-4, I-5). An attacker wishing control simply establishes a connection with the data acquisition equipment and issues the appropriate commands. Misconfigurations. System data is collected, processed and stored in a master database server. A backup control center is used in more critical applications to provide a secondary control system if there is a catastrophic loss of the main system. While the Pentagon report has yet to be released, a scathing report on Defense Department weapons systems [2] published early this October by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) [] This will increase effectiveness. Enhancing endpoint security (meaning on devices such as desktops, laptops, mobile devices, etc), is another top priority when enhancing DOD cybersecurity. 47 Ibid., 25. 21 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, December 2017), 27, available at . Adversaries studied the American way of war and began investing in capabilities that targeted our strengths and sought to exploit perceived weaknesses.21 In this new environment, cyberspace is a decisive arena in broader GPC, with significant implications for cross-domain deterrence.22, The literature on the feasibility of deterrence in cyberspace largely focuses on within-domain deterrencein other words, the utility and feasibility of using (or threatening) cyber means to deter cyber behavior.23 Scholars have identified a number of important impediments to this form of cyber deterrence.24 For instance, the challenges of discerning timely and accurate attribution could weaken cyber deterrence through generating doubt about the identity of the perpetrator of a cyberattack, which undermines the credibility of response options.25 Uncertainty about the effects of cyber capabilitiesboth anticipating them ex ante and measuring them ex postmay impede battle damage assessments that are essential for any deterrence calculus.26 This uncertainty is further complicated by limitations in the ability to hold targets at risk or deliver effects repeatedly over time.27 A deterring state may avoid revealing capabilities (which enhances the credibility of deterrence) because the act of revealing them renders the capabilities impotent.28 Finally, the target may simply not perceive the threatened cyber costs to be sufficiently high to affect its calculus, or the target may be willing to gamble that a threatened action may not produce the effect intended by the deterring state due to the often unpredictable and fleeting nature of cyber operations and effects.29 Others offer a more sanguine take. Ibid., 25. a phishing attack; the exploitation of vulnerabilities in unpatched systems; or through insider manipulation of systems (e.g. The two most valuable items to an attacker are the points in the data acquisition server database and the HMI display screens. Mark Montgomery is Executive Director of the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission and SeniorDirector of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation. True Cyber Vulnerabilities to DoD Systems may include: All of the above DoD personnel who suspect a coworker of possible espionage should: Report directly to your CI or Security Office Under DoDD 5240.06 Reportable Foreign Intelligence Contacts, Activities, Indicators and Behaviors; which of the following is not reportable? Telematics should therefore be considered a high-risk domain for systemic vulnerabilities. Such devices should contain software designed to both notify and protect systems in case of an attack. Streamlining public-private information-sharing. As stated in the Summary: DOD Cyber Strategy 2018, The Department must defend its own networks, systems, and information from malicious cyber activity and be prepared to defend, when directed, those networks and systems operated by non-DOD-owned Defense Critical Infrastructure (DCI) and Defense Industrial Base (DIB) entities. Ensuring the Cyber Mission Force has the right size for the mission is important. Unfortunately, in many cases when contractors try to enhance their security, they face a lot of obstacles that prevent them from effectively keeping their data and infrastructure protected. . Every business has its own minor variations dictated by their environment. As adversaries cyber threats become more sophisticated, addressing the cybersecurity of DODs increasingly advanced and networked weapons systems should be prioritized. The attacker dials every phone number in a city looking for modems. Objective. Misconfigurations are the single largest threat to both cloud and app security. For example, China is the second-largest spender on research and development (R&D) after the United States, accounting for 21 percent of the worlds total R&D spending in 2015. In cybersecurity, a vulnerability is known to be any kind of weakness exist with the aim to be exploited by cybercriminals to be able to have unauthorized access to a computer system. In this way, cyber vulnerabilities that adversaries exploit in routine competition below the level of war have dangerous implications for the U.S. ability to deter and prevail in conflict above that thresholdeven in a noncyber context. See also Martin C. Libicki, David Senty, and Julia Pollak, Hackers Wanted: An Examination of the Cybersecurity Labor Market (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2014), x; Julian Jang-Jaccard and Surya Nepal, A Survey of Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 80, no. The Department of Defense (DOD) strategic concept of defend forward and U.S. Cyber Commands concept of persistent engagement are largely directed toward this latter challenge. 1981); Lawrence D. Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels. 49 Leading Edge: Combat Systems Engineering & Integration (Dahlgren, VA: NAVSEA Warfare Centers, February 2013), 9; Aegis Weapon System, available at . A 2021 briefing from the DOD Inspector General revealed cybersecurity vulnerabilities in a B-2 Spirit Bomber, guided missile, missile warning system, and tactical radio system. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Thomas C. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). 55 Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, available at ; DOD, Press Briefing by Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen M. Lord, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Kevin Fahey, and Chief Information Security Officer for Acquisition Katie Arrington, January 31, 2020, available at . A surgical attacker needs a list of the point reference numbers in use and the information required to assign meaning to each of those numbers. 9 Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, Deterrence and the Cold War, Political Science Quarterly 110, no. The public-private cybersecurity partnership provides a collaborative environment for crowd-sourced threat sharing at both unclassified and classified levels, CDC cyber resilience analysis, and cyber security-as-a-service pilot . Figure 1. The department is expanding its Vulnerability Disclosure Program to include all publicly accessible DOD information systems. The consequences are significant, particularly in the nuclear command and control realm, because not employing a capability could undermine positive and negative control over nuclear weapons and inevitably the stability of nuclear deterrence. large versionFigure 5: Business LAN as backbone. Implementing the Cyberspace Solarium Commissions recommendations would go a long way toward restoring confidence in the security and resilience of the U.S. military capabilities that are the foundation of the Nations deterrent. More commercial technology will be integrated into current systems for maximum effectiveness in the ever-changing cybersphere. It may appear counter-intuitive to alter a solution that works for business processes. Sharing information with other federal agencies, our own agencies, and foreign partners and allies who have advanced cyber capabilities. "In operational testing, DoD routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in systems that were under development, yet program officials GAO met with believed their systems were secure and discounted some test results as unrealistic," GAO said.
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