Biblio

NATO strategy and policy has increasingly focused on incorporating cyber operations to support deterrence, warfighting, and intelligence objectives. However, offensive cyber operations in particular have presented a delicate challenge for the alliance. As cyber threats to NATO members continue to grow, the alliance has begun to address how it could incorporate offensive cyber operations into its strategy and policy. However, there are significant hurdles to meaningful cooperation on offensive cyber operations, in contrast with the high levels of integration in other operational domains. Moreover, there is a critical gap in existing conceptualizations of the role of offensive cyber operations in NATO policy. Specifically, NATO cyber policy has focused on cyber operations in a warfighting context at the expense of considering cyber operations below the level of conflict. In this article, we explore the potential role for offensive cyber operations not only in wartime but also below the threshold of armed conflict. In doing so, we systematically explore a number of challenges at the political/strategic as well as the operational/tactical levels and provide policy recommendations for next steps for the alliance.

Ransomware groups represent a significant cyber threat to Western states. Most high-end ransomware actors reside in territorial safe-haven jurisdictions and prove to be resistant to traditional law enforcement activities. This has prompted public sector and cybersecurity industry leaders to perceive ransomware as a national security threat requiring a whole-of-government approach, including cyber operations. In this paper, we investigate whether cyber operations or the threat of cyber operations influence the ransomware ecosystem. Subsequently, we assess the vectors of influence and characteristics of past operations that have disrupted the ecosystem. We describe the specifics of the ransomware-as-a-service system and provide three case studies (DarkSide/BlackMatter, REvil, Conti) highly representative of the current ecosystem and the effect cyber operations have on it. Additionally, we present initial observations about the influence of cyber operations on the system, including best practices from cyber operations against non-state groups. We conclude that even professional, highly skilled, and top-performing ransomware groups can be disrupted through cyber operations. In fact, cyber operations can even bypass some limits imposed on law enforcement operations. Even when ransomware groups rebrand or resurface after a hiatus, we suggest their infrastructure (both technical, human, and reputational) will still suffer mid-to long-term disruption. Although cyber operations are unlikely to be a silver bullet, they are an essential tool in the whole-of-government and multinational efforts and may even grow in importance in the next several years.1‘Releasing the hounds’ is a term for offensive cyber operations aimed at disrupting global ransomware gangs, especially those conducted by militaries or intelligence agencies. First use is found in Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau, ‘Feature Podcast: Releasing the Hounds with Bobby Chesney’, Risky Business, 28 May 2020, https://risky.biz/HF6/.

Few developments seem as poised to alter the characteristics of security in the digital age as the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. For national defense establishments, the emergence of AI techniques is particularly worrisome, not least because prototype applications already exist. Cyber attacks augmented by AI portend the tailored manipulation of human vectors within the attack surface of important societal systems at great scale, as well as opportunities for calamity resulting from the secondment of technical skill from the hacker to the algorithm. Arguably most important, however, is the fact that AI-enabled cyber campaigns contain great potential for operational obfuscation and strategic misdirection. At the operational level, techniques for piggybacking onto routine activities and for adaptive evasion of security protocols add uncertainty, complicating the defensive mission particularly where adversarial learning tools are employed in offense. Strategically, AI-enabled cyber operations offer distinct attempts to persistently shape the spectrum of cyber contention may be able to pursue conflict outcomes beyond the expected scope of adversary operation. On the other, AI-augmented cyber defenses incorporated into national defense postures are likely to be vulnerable to "poisoning" attacks that predict, manipulate and subvert the functionality of defensive algorithms. This article takes on two primary tasks. First, it considers and categorizes the primary ways in which AI technologies are likely to augment offensive cyber operations, including the shape of cyber activities designed to target AI systems. Then, it frames a discussion of implications for deterrence in cyberspace by referring to the policy of persistent engagement, agreed competition and forward defense promulgated in 2018 by the United States. Here, it is argued that the centrality of cyberspace to the deployment and operation of soon-to-be-ubiquitous AI systems implies new motivations for operation within the domain, complicating numerous assumptions that underlie current approaches. In particular, AI cyber operations pose unique measurement issues for the policy regime.