By TIM STARKS

DEFENSE BILL GOES BIG ON CYBER — The final defense policy bill unveiled Monday would overhaul U.S. cyber defense policies, putting the country on a more aggressive footing against digital adversaries. The compromise fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 5515),hammered out by House and Senate lawmakers, features several modified proposals from the upper chamber draft, such as setting the nation’s first cyber warfare policy, affirming the authority of the Defense secretary to conduct clandestine military activities and operations in cyberspace, and authorizing the president to direct U.S. Cyber Command to take steps to counter Russia, China, Iran and North Korea in cyberspace.

The negotiated measure also includes a provision to establish a “Cyberspace Solarium Commission” — a 13-member panel to develop a strategic approach to protecting and defending U.S. interests online — and a pilot program authorizing the Defense Department to provide technical experts to the Homeland Security Department to boost cooperation to protect critical infrastructure, according to a Democratic summary of the policy roadmap. It also requires DoD to notify lawmakers of cybersecurity breaches and loss of information from approved defense contractors, a response to the recent incident where Chinese hackers stole troves of data about the country’s submarine efforts from a contractor.

The measure additionally mandates that the Pentagon chief notify lawmakers in the event of a data breach that exposes the personal information of service members and create a pilot program within the Defense Digital Service to identify new ways to evaluate cyber vulnerabilities in DOD’s critical infrastructure. The policy blueprint would also put Cyber Command in charge of defending the military’s information network. The House is expected to voteon the final bill some time this week.

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PUTTING THE RISK IN CONTEXT — State and local officials will emphasize at a House Oversight hearing today that while they’re taking the election security threat seriously, they’re confident that there’s little chance of dramatically influencing the results of the 2018 midterms. “From a cybersecurity standpoint, we are most acutely concerned with ‘social engineering’ hacking attempts, which include phishing and baiting attempts through email” prior to the election, according to prepared testimony from Weber County, Utah, clerk/auditor Ricky Hatch, speaking on behalf of the National Association of Counties. “Most hacks are unsuccessful and crude attempts, akin to a burglar driving down a street looking for open windows or jiggling the locks, but it only takes one breach to cause significant problems.” Like Hatch, the representative of the National Association of Secretaries of State will point out that key systems aren’t connected to the internet. “If our protections to our voter registration system are breached, we can address that and the vote count is not impacted,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver’s prepared remarks read. “If our protections election night reporting website are breached, we can address that and the vote count is not impacted.” The bigger concern is voter confidence, she will say.

Republicans’ goals for the hearing — which will also feature testimony from top DHS cybersecurity and infrastructure protection official Chris Krebs and Election Assistance Commission Chairman Thomas Hicks similar to their recent Hill appearances — are to assess election security preparedness across all levels of government, and to see what can be done before the 2018 elections to safeguard them. Democrats plan to lob a few protests, a Democratic committee staffer told MC. Among them: Republicans should have invited the director of national intelligence to testify, given his warnings about ongoing Russian interference; the GOP should back additional election security funds after rejecting them last week; and Republicans need to aid Democrats’ requests to DHS for more information on the alleged 2016 Russian attacks.

CDM LEGISLATION UP TO BAT — The House Homeland Security Committee today marks up legislation (H.R. 6443) that would enshrine DHS’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program in law and require that it keep pace with technological advancements that would aid the program’s goal of strengthening federal agencies’ digital defenses. Rep. John Ratcliffe, the bill’s sponsor, will argue at the markup that the legislation is necessary after a recent government report that most federal agencies are at risk of failing their cybersecurity program. “It is DHS’s CDM program that will help federal agencies and the whole of the federal government understand the threats they face, and the risks vulnerabilities pose in real-time,” his prepared opening remarks read.

Rep. Jim Langevin plans to offer an amendment to the bill to reflect his concerns that the original four-phased plan for implementing CDM might no longer be the best approach. “Many of the tools and services available under Phase 3 and Phase 4 would both be useful in agencies now, and it remains unclear to me why the Department would not aim to implement them in parallel,” he said in a statement emailed to MC. “My amendment will require DHS to address these important questions in its strategy and implementation plan required under the bill.”

LIFE, AND PEN-TESTING, FINDS A WAY — Penetration testers continue to slip into systems like they’re Swiss cheese, according to a new reportfrom the security firm Rapid7, which offers pen-testing services. The company said its employees successfully exploited a digital flaw in 84 percent of attempts, while its success rate for abusing a “network misconfiguration” was just slightly lower, at 80 percent. “The environments where software vulnerabilities were encountered grew significantly” from the previous survey period to the current one, Rapid7 said in its report, which is based on 268 pen-testing “engagements” conducted between last September and mid-June.

The three most common configuration errors that opened the door for pen-testers were “service misconfiguration,” password reuse, and accounts holding unnecessarily elevated privileges. Meanwhile, the most popular password lengths are eight, 10, and nine digits, respectively, according to Rapid7’s database of compromised credentials. Eight-digit passwords are far and away the most popular, accounting for 46 percent of the database.

“It is practically inevitable that an experienced penetration tester will uncover at least one vulnerability or misconfiguration and use it to their advantage,” the company said in its report. “However, this should not cause IT, security, and development teams to lose heart; there are strategies available to help minimize the impact of a breach, both simulated by a penetration tester or caused by a real threat actor.”

MORE INFO SURFACES ON GRID ATTACKS — “Hackers working for Russia claimed ‘hundreds of victims’ last year in a giant and long-running campaign that put them inside the control rooms of U.S. electric utilities where they could have caused blackouts, federal officials said,” The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. “They said the campaign likely is continuing.” The hackers “broke into supposedly secure, ‘air-gapped’ or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative ease by first penetrating the networks of key vendors who had trusted relationships with the power companies.”

TAX FRAUD — The IRS could be doing more to prevent identity theft, according to a watchdog report out Monday. The Government Accountability Office made 11 recommendations for the IRS to follow to help ensure people are who they say they are online and elsewhere. Most notably, GAO suggests the service should follow the latest NIST guidelines on cybersecurity and direct its Identity Assurance Office to help develop a plan for implementing changes to its online authentication programs consistent with NIST.

LET ME SEE SOME I.D. — DHS on Monday awarded a $200,000 grant to a Canadian company that will design a system to authenticate smart devices and prevent them from being hijacked for cyberattacks. Plurilock Security Solutions Inc. will develop the system based on its existing BioTracker identity management platform. DHS’s goal is “to prevent spoofing of [internet of things devices] that can involve unfriendly actors pretending to be smart devices to launch attacks, access and steal user information, spread malware or bypass security,” according to an agency statement. DHS said BioTracker would suit this mission well because it “uses behavioral and contextual data from users to authenticate the identity of [a smart device] to protect it” from threats like DDoS attacks and botnets. Plurilock’s grant is the latest from the DHS Science & Technology Directorate’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program. It is the second non-American company to receive a SVIP grant.

RECENTLY ON PRO CYBERSECURITY — Twenty-one state attorneys general urged Congress to take action on election security. … National security adviser John Bolton will meet with his Russian counterpart next month. … Here’s how U.S. spies can figure out what President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed. … Secretary of State Mike Pompeo turned down an invitation to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about Trump’s interactions with Russian and European leaders, citing a scheduling conflict, but will testify on the same subject before the Senate Foreign Relations panel.

— A survey of chief executive officers revealed that 72 percent admitted that they took intellectual property from a former employer, but 78 percent agree that IP is the most valuable asset their companies have. The survey, by data security company Code42, also found that the CEOs were fairly cavalier with protecting their work: 93 percent said they keep copies of their work on a personal device, 63 percent confessed to clicking on a link they should’ve have or didn’t mean to and 59 percent said they downloaded software without knowing if it was approved by company security. Separately, the survey findings include the opinions and impressions of chief information security officers on a range of data security questions as well.

By GoLocalProv News Team

Congressman Jim Langevin is calling Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers the most significant hacking case in U.S. history.

Mueller indicted the Russian officers for distributing documents they had stolen from U.S. political organizations in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

According to the Justice Department, the hacking targeted Clinton’s campaign, Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Langevin Released the Following Statement:

“This is the most significant hacking case the United States has ever brought against the agents of a foreign state. Russian interference in the 2016 election struck at the very core of our democracy, and the perpetrators must be held to account. This is another example of why Director Mueller’s investigation is so important and must be allowed to continue.

This indictment is an important part of that reckoning, but it is in no way sufficient. When a nation violates the norms of responsible state behavior in cyberspace, we must respond with all means of state power, economic, diplomatic and otherwise. It is simply unacceptable to use cyber means to steal and disseminate political documents with the goals of undermining faith in American democracy. Sadly, the President continues to cast doubt on the facts first set forth by our intelligence community and reiterated in today’s indictment. Given these developments, the President should cancel next week’s meeting with Vladimir Putin and work with Congress to punish Russia for its actions.

The indictments today continue to reinforce a clear message to America’s adversaries who would target civilian infrastructure and processes: you will be found out. Although we are unlikely to see these Russian military intelligence agents in an American prison anytime soon, their worlds have gotten much smaller. I look forward to continuing my work in Congress to hold Russia responsible for its actions and improve our cybersecurity posture.”

By WPRO News Team and the Associated Press

By Derek B. Johnson

For years, security experts have warned of an impending cyber Pearl Harbor: an attack so big and bold that it cripples U.S. infrastructure and demands a military response.

However, in interviews with former White House and executive branch officials as well as members of Congress and staffers involved in cyber policy, many expressed more concern about the potential for a Cyber Gulf of Tonkin: a misunderstanding or misattribution around an event that precipitates or is used as a justification for war.

“I think we should all be concerned about a [misunderstanding] or something that is made to look like someone else took action,” said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a co-founder of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus. “Attribution is very difficult, although we are getting much better at it. There’s no doubt there could always be a level of uncertainty.”

The U.S. government is currently engaged in disputes with at least four other countries — Iran, North Korea, Russia and China — over a series of recent hacks, intrusions and cyberattacks dating back five years. In cases like Iran and North Korea, some worry the situation is potentially one precipitating incident away from breaking out into military conflict.

Furthermore, members of Congress have increasingly agitatedfor a more forceful response against nation-state- led cyberattacks, while providing little in the way of statutory guidance around rules of engagement for offensive cyber operations, including which agencies should take the lead and how brightly the lines should be drawn between private sector, civilian government and military response.

Blurred lines

The federal government lacks a commonly understood framework for the type and scope of actions that would or would not qualify as an act of war in cyberspace.

“There isn’t [a document] — to my knowledge at least when I was in government — where it’s like ‘this is our list’ and if it’s one of these things then we’re going to declare war,” said Megan Stifel, a former director of international cyber policy on the National Security Council.  “It’s not very helpful and reassuring to many to say that we’ll know it when we see it, but that has been a bit of the philosophy because we haven’t seen it yet.”

Stifel pointed to many of the most high-profile attacks against United States assets – such as the 2016 election disinformation campaign, the 2017 WannaCry attacks, the 2014 Sony hack and the Office of Personnel Management hack — and questioned whether any of them could truly be interpreted as a genuine act of war by the nations who supposedly carried them out.

In its new command vision on information warfare, U.S. Cyber Command noted that nation-states have taken advantage of this ambiguous policy landscape to conduct aggressive cyber campaigns to harm or destabilize U.S. interests and infrastructure.

“Adversaries continuously operate against us below the threshold of armed conflict. In this ‘new normal,’ our adversaries are extending their influence without resorting to physical aggression,” the vision statement reads.

Some have argued that such direction would allow policymakers to clearly communicate which kind of attacks and targets are beyond the pale and require an in-kind cyber or even kinetic military response. Alternatively, the absence of such a framework carries the risk of fostering confusion and misunderstandings on the international stage that could precipitate a larger conflict.

“There are these questions of ‘what was the intent?’ and I think we need to be careful not to go [like the metaphorical hammer] looking for nails,” Stifel said. “Because of the way western democracies have the private sector own most of the communications and information technology infrastructure, the lines are very blurred.”

A shifting policy landscape

That ambiguity has left some perplexed as to how best to respond to a series of cyber-focused operations against the United States.

Langevin is one of 12 members of Congress to co-sponsor a bill introduced this year by Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fl.) that would require the president to single out as a “critical cyber threat” any foreign persons or entities determined to be responsible for a cyberattack as well as any person or organization that “knowingly materially assisted or attempted such activities.” Those actors would then be subject to a range of potential economic and travel-related sanctions. Yoho’s bill recentlypassed the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has garnered support from a bipartisan group of cybersecurity-focused lawmakers in the House.

The legislation is meant to codify many of the strategies employed during the first 18 months of the Trump administration to respond to high-profile cyberattacks against the United States, pairing “name and shame” tactics with economic and political pressure in a way that results in meaningful consequences for those who step over the line.

The problem is many policymakers are unsure where those lines actually are, and some question whether it’s even a good idea to draw them in the first place.

Langevin believes that legislation like Yoho’s bill will help to better police “the grey zone” around nation-state cyberattacks, but said he worries that being too specific could feed the potential for a Gulf of Tonkin-like misunderstanding.

“It’s hard to draw red lines in cyberspace as the threats are rapidly evolving,” said Langevin. “We have to be careful about being too prescriptive.”

That view was echoed by many others. A majority staffer on one of the congressional homeland security committees speaking on background was reluctant to even offer a broad outline of a cyber warfare doctrine, arguing the landscape is so unsettled and the potential for new technologies like AI, quantum computing and augmented reality to disrupt the status mean that any rules the Trump administration or Congress lays out today could be obsolete five years down the road.

Even worse, the rules could box them into enforcing ultimatums that no longer makes sense in an evolving policy environment. The staffer compared the status quo to “Calvinball,” a game from the popular comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” in which the only rule is that the rules must constantly change.

“We don’t have examples in history of that kind of asymmetry and how to handle it,” the staffer said. “Even if you looped in the smartest, most knowledgeable people with all of the letters after their name that you could possibly imagine, they couldn’t sit in a room and say 10 years from now, this framework will still hold true.”

Over the past year, policymakers have been working behind the scenes to carve out a larger role for U.S. Cyber Command. CyberScoop reported in April that CyberCom has been steadily winning a tug of war with intelligence agencies for supremacy over offensive cyber operations, including those taking place outside of traditional war zones. More recently, the organization has been wading into what is typically considered the Department of Homeland Security’s turf by establishing threat information sharing programs with the banking sector.

Curtis Dukes, who ran the National Security Agency’s Information Assurance unit, said unleashing a military organization like Cyber Command to engage in offensive operations outside of war zones without a shared doctrine for conducting information warfare is a recipe for unintended consequences.

“We don’t know with any level of precision what would actually constitute an act of war where we would respond either militarily or using our own cyber offensive capabilities,” Dukes said. “Frankly, that needs to occur if we’re going to use Cyber Command as a capability to protect the homeland.”

A former high-ranking congressional staffer who worked on military cyber policy speaking on background concurred with that sentiment, saying the U.S. lacks a solid interagency process for weighing risks and examining the trade-offs of such operations.

“I’m sure there are places where it would be appropriate for CyberCom to be more aggressive, but I can tell you having sat over at DOD, that CyberCom would bring out some really stupid proposals that would sometimes ignore risks to things like the integrity of the global financial system,” the source said.

Like many of those interviewed, the former staffer cited the recent elimination of the White House cyber coordinator position as a move that would only exacerbate these problems. Langevin as well as Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) have introducedlegislation to restore the position.

Pinning the blame

There are political and public relations factors to consider as well. When nations go to war, they often couch their decision as a defensive or retaliatory response to some malicious precipitating event.

Proving to allies and the international community that a cyberattack came at the behest of a particular nation-state is difficult. Most instances of cyber attribution — such as those done with WannaCry and NotPetya — can take months if not years before reaching a high confidence assessment.

Even then, policymakers may not want to risk exposing intelligence-related sources and methods. In December, the White House publicly blamed North Korea for the 2016 WannaCry malware.

Tom Bossert, who served as White House homeland security advisor at the time, told reporters that intelligence and technical forensics gave the government high confidence about the attribution, but he declined to specify what evidence the administration was relying on and indicated that a smoking gun definitively associating the attacks to Pyongyang was “difficult” to come by.

That sort of posture could make it trickier to convince allies that the evidence justifies a cyber or military response. A State Department document providing guidance to the president on international engagement around cyber matters released May 31 notes that “difficulty attributing the source of [cyber] attacks or sharing sensitive evidence to support attribution findings has made international or public-private cooperation to respond to specific threats more challenging.”

Such cooperation is critical to establishing international rules of engagement in most domains of war, according to John Dickson, a former Air Force officer who previously served in the Air Force Information Warfare Center. While other domains of war have had millennia to develop clear lines of engagement, there’s still significant uncertainty around how best to respond to incidents of information warfare. Because of that, Dickson argued it’s sometimes best to leave policymakers with maximum flexibility.

“We don’t have anywhere near the level of history, the level of conflict, the level of openness and visibility [with cyberwar] that you have in other wars,” Dickson said. “The biggest deal is that if you’re a talented attacker, certainly a nation-state attacker, you can prosecute and attack and still maintain some level of deniability.”