Communications of the ACM
Pentagon Announces New Strategy For Cyberwarfare
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has announced a new Pentagon strategy that discusses the circumstances under which the U.S. could use cyberweapons against attackers.
Credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
During a speech at Stanford University on Thursday, U.S. Department of Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced a new Pentagon strategy that for the first time explicitly discusses the circumstances under which the U.S. could use cyberweapons against attackers.
The new strategy also explicitly names China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as the countries most likely to pose a cyberthreat to the U.S.
A previous strategy released in 2011 was less detailed, only alluding to cyberweapons and talking vaguely about potential adversaries.
During his speech, Carter said the Pentagon had detected and repelled an intrusion into its unclassified networks by Russian hackers in recent months.
The new strategy lays out a hierarchy for cyberattacks and who should respond to them and how, and says the U.S. will only conduct what it calls a "cyberspace operation" if it has exhausted all "network defense and law enforcement actions."
However, it allows the president and the secretary of Defense to authorize operations "to disrupt an adversary's military related networks or infrastructure so that the U.S. military can protect U.S. interests in an area of operations."
The phrasing of the strategy seems to leave open the possibility of the U.S. carrying out a preemptive cyberattack.
From The New York Times
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