I've long wondered if we're going to see cyber warfare "letters of marque" at some point.
In retaliation to cyber attacks on US companies, the US government could designate Chinese firms with connections to the Chinese government (and particularly those which support the Chinese military) in letters of marque, allowing retaliatory IP theft, permission to cause damages, etc.
If the Chinese government is behind these attacks on US companies, than we are in a de facto state of warfare.
But federal law enforcement could simply decline to pursue private actors who attacked adversary states. Plausible deniability, to an extent.
Live by the sword...What if NSA already did the same to China? That's their mission, isn't it? China's "NSA" succeeded but became public.
Our NSA might have succeed dozens of time but China keeps it a secret.
Our way of life is kind of fucked, to be blunt, and our consumer tech culture could use a cull.
Those who don't understand or respect tech...they haven't been (explained/bitten by) the consequences of their ignorance.
I've seen one these "lone wolf" actor preemptively collecting emails of a very high profile target via sophisticated penatration (APT? LOL), then sold these data to a state-owned enterprise. In exchange his hacking violations were cleared.
The government simply kept a loose end to these kind of foreign hacks. For domestic offense, the rules are very strict. Some dude famously posted some kind of minor XSS vulnerability of a random PLA veteran management site, then the hole public disclosure site was shutdown by the government and site admin was jailed. LMAO. So today the Chinese underground market was more active than ever before, because there are no more free bugs.
Everything you just said--if legitimate and if identified via IC-contracted *INT--would with near-certainty be classified and appropriately compartmentalized. If it's research from an outside institution, it'd be more interesting to read it.
Connecting to a government-supported operation has already be done before [0]. There probably isn’t that much difficulty to do it again.
This is extremely weak reasoning. Any state actor would have the ability to cover its tracks, and more importantly to frame other state actors.
The article ends with a bit of classic anti-communism fear mongering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61398
Mandiant's report: https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdf...
Why would it matter if the claim were Russia, China, or North Korea?
I can also imagine how this line could be blurry... perhaps the government quietly permits more profit motivated blackhat operations in exchange for some intelligence sharing. And really the perfect "cyber attack" shouldn't be attributable at all.