A top lawyer for America's cyberwarrior force is calling publicly for military operations against transnational criminal hackers, shedding light on a debate inside and outside the government about how best to deal with ransomware.
Healey had argued that a military cyber operation against criminal hackers should be considered only in the rare event that it met a five-part test that requires the threat to be imminent, extremely dangerous and linked to major nation-state adversaries.
"If implemented, Healey's five-part test would significantly disadvantage the United States and take major assets out of the president's hands," Sanger and Pascucci write."The self-restraint imposed by this test is ill fit given the nature of cybercrime, the nature of cyberspace targets, and the threats cybercrime poses to the nation and its interests."and engaging in gray zone operations," they write.
"Gray zone operations" refers to efforts by nation-states to use proxies and other deniable means to inflict pain on adversaries to an extent that is just short of an act of war, with the idea of limiting possible retaliation. Traditionally, U.S. law and policy call for the military to be used against foreign and terrorist threats. But there have been real-world exceptions, as when Navy SEALsTypically, the FBI investigates cybercrime with an eye toward prosecution. Military cyber operations against criminal hacking networks appear to have been extremely rare.
"We tend to divide cyber bad actors into different categories, and that sort of dictates who responds," said Gary Brown, a professor of cyber law at National Defense University and a former counsel to Cyber Command.hackers in the biggest known example of a military cyber operation against criminals.