Comment by pants2
12 hours ago
When will countries start treating cyberattacks as an act of war? If the North Korean military came to America and robbed fort Knox of $200M in gold there would be retribution. But hack an American company for the same amount and the feds do nothing.
Ok, so we treat it as an act of war. Now what? Attack North Korea? Great, the entire city of Seoul gets shelled within five minutes of your attack and hundreds of thousands of innocent people die.
It's very easy to play with lives that aren't yours.
You would be surprised how many people naively think "Why doesn't my country just open a war on X country and this Y problem will be solved forever" in their head they think war is just a flurry of bombardments and the other side (not theirs) is just destroyed to rubble and their country will have only minimal losses
Many country leaders also clearly think the same
Never retaliating is a great way to get people to attack you. Of course escalating to all-out war provokes the same in response, but there does need to be a proportionate response, because it needs to be stupid to hurt us, not good business. t’s a significant failure of the US government when half the world freely loots US citizens and businesses.
Exactly. This is the "Declare fentanyl a WMD" of solutions to ransomware. Sounds kinda badass as long as you don't spend too long thinking about it but has no practical relevance to actual enforcement challenges.
It's a familiar example of the perennial "[THING] could be solved overnight if [PERSON_OR_GROUP] would just start taking [THING] seriously" trope.
How do you know which country to blame? It is standard practice for foreign actors (or just hackers in general) to use proxies around the world to misdirect and insert false clues as to their origin. It could be an American teenager proxying through North Korea, and it could be a North Korean proxying through another American teenager's residential connection, there's no way to know.
They already do. This is what asymmetric warfare looks like, your weakest links will break in a time of crisis. Focusing on retribution for the Dunder Mifflin cyberattack is pointless, the adversarial motivation is purely to disrupt and extort.
The best response to a cyberattack on critical systems is to take security seriously. Document the offense, avoid the same mistakes and invest in penetration testing. Of course, nobody is incentivized to do that until they're attacked, so the cycle perpetuates itself.
> When will countries start treating cyberattacks as an act of war?
When appropriate. I.e. never.