Excellent and very timely. Untimely we need an international or even bi-lateral Cyber Security Treaties. While we wait for that, and it should be priority 1, we need to treat any perpetrator of cyber warfare (ransom ware, hacks into any government or commercial facility) as active national security threats, acts of WAR and criminal prosecution. The US should go so far as to apprehend or go weapons hot military Special Forces attacks on any perpetrator. We must also use active measures and defensive measures (simple DNS attacks and more sophisticated solutions) to disrupt and take down their networks while bringing them to justice publicly. The seals could carry out this solution. It would not take too many cyber criminals being apprehended anywhere in the word or double tapped while trying to escape to scare the S--T out of any of them. A cyber version of Mutually Assured Destruction. Additionally state sponsors should see reciprocal measures when they have sanctioned, profited or know about and allow to operate within their territories (Russia is one big gas station, hacked pipelines bring them to their knees, food supply, lights out, water systems disrupted, etc.) we could easily show them force. Why are we not actively showing our muscle to Russia, North Korea, Iran, Turkey and many other state sponsors of Cyber Terrorism? If the United States wants to regain its stature in the work, a solution to Cyber Terrorism would make the free word respect out might and alliances while the dictators quake at the potential repercussions! Most of us do not know that there is an international market for commercial and government zero days exploits worth billions of dollars. Instead of the US government paying the hackers who sell these programs to any willing buyer with the money to pay (this did not begin, but accelerated when Snowden published the NSA and CIA hacking tools that were proprietary national defense tools to keep the US as the leader in Cyber). We should give those gifted hackers two choices. Work for the US exclusively or face the penalty of Cyber Terrorists.
To learn more about the mess cyber is worldwide I would highly recommend Nichole Perlroth’s excellent book: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyber Weapons Arms Race, available on Amazon and Audible.
