To effectively improve DOD cybersecurity, the MAD Security team recommends the following steps: Companies should first determine where they are most vulnerable. In some, but not all, vendor's control systems, manipulating the data in the database can perform arbitrary actions on the control system (see Figure 15). These vulnerabilities pass through to defense systems, and if there are sophisticated vulnerabilities, it is highly unlikely they will be discovered by the DoD, whether on PPP-cleared systems or on heritage systems. 2 (2016), 6673; Nye, Deterrence and Dissuasion, 4471; Martin C. Libicki, Cyberspace in Peace and War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016); Aaron F. Brantly, The Cyber Deterrence Problem, in 2018 10th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, ed. . John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, Pub. Nevertheless, the stakes remain high to preserve the integrity of core conventional and nuclear deterrence and warfighting capabilities, and efforts thus far, while important, have not been sufficiently comprehensive. This article recommends the DoD adopt an economic strategy called the vulnerability market, or the market for zero-day exploits, to enhance system Information Assurance.
Common firewall flaws include passing Microsoft Windows networking packets, passing rservices, and having trusted hosts on the business LAN. As DOD begins to use and incorporate emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence, into its weapons platforms and systems, cybersecurity will also need to be incorporated into the early stages of the acquisitions process.
large versionFigure 1: Communications access to control systems. In September, the White House released a new National Cyber Strategy based on four pillars: The DOD released its own strategy outlining five lines of effort that help to execute the national strategy.
The costs can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands, payable to cybercriminals in Bitcoin. . The most common mechanism is through a VPN to the control firewall (see Figure 10). A binding operational directive is a compulsory direction to federal, executive branch, departments and agencies for purposes of safeguarding federal information . Individual weapons platforms do not in reality operate in isolation from one another. L. No. This means that a singular static assessment is unlikely to capture how vulnerabilities may evolve and change over time.43 Relatedly, a 2018 Government Accountability Office report found pervasive and significant mission-critical vulnerabilities across most weapons systems already under development.44 Between 2012 and 2017, DOD penetration testersindividuals who evaluate the cybersecurity of computer systems and uncover vulnerabilitiesdiscovered mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in nearly all weapon systems under development.45 Penetration testing teams were able to overcome weapons systems cybersecurity controls designed to prevent determined adversaries from gaining access to these platforms and to maneuver within compromised systems while successfully evading detection. There are a number of common ways an attacker can gain access, but the miscellaneous pathways outnumber the common pathways. "These weapons are essential to maintaining our nation . Optimizing the mix of service members, civilians and contractors who can best support the mission. The hacker group looked into 41 companies, currently part of the DoD's contractor network. 3 (2017), 454455. Troops have to increasingly worry about cyberattacks while still achieving their missions, so the DOD needs to make processes more flexible. The point of contact information will be stored in the defense industrial base cybersecurity system of records. warnings were so common that operators were desensitized to them.46 Existing testing programs are simply too limited to enable DOD to have a complete understanding of weapons system vulnerabilities, which is compounded by a shortage of skilled penetration testers.47. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines a vulnerability as a "weakness in an information system, system security procedures, internal controls, or implementation that could be exploited or triggered by a threat source." Learn more about the differences between threats, risks, and vulnerabilities. 2 (February 2016). Information gathered and activities conducted to identify, deceive, exploit, disrupt, or protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers, organizations or persons or their agents or international terrorist organizations. Most of the attacker's off-the-shelf hacking tools can be directly applied to the problem. 1 Build a more lethal. Defense Acquisition Regulations System, Attn: Ms. Kimberly Ziegler, OUSD(A&S)DPC(DARS), 3060 . 115232August 13, 2018, 132 Stat. L. No. That means a thorough strategy is needed to preserve U.S. cyberspace superiority and stop cyberattacks before they hit our networks. Strengthening the cybersecurity of systems and networks that support DOD missions, including those in the private sector and our foreign allies and partners. Contact us today to set up your cyber protection. The program grew out of the success of the "Hack the Pentagon". An attacker will attempt to gain access to internal vendor resources or field laptops and piggyback on the connection into the control system LAN. The attacker dials every phone number in a city looking for modems. The business LAN is protected from the Internet by a firewall and the control system LAN is protected from the business LAN by a separate firewall. 30 Dorothy E. Denning, Rethinking the Cyber Domain and Deterrence, Joint Force Quarterly 77 (2nd Quarter 2015). 4 (Spring 1980), 6. Specifically, efforts to defend forward below the level of warto observe and pursue adversaries as they maneuver in gray and red space, and to counter adversary operations, capabilities, and infrastructure when authorizedcould yield positive cascading effects that support deterrence of strategic cyberattacks.4, Less attention, however, has been devoted to the cross-domain nexus between adversary cyber campaigns below the level of war and the implications for conventional or nuclear deterrence and warfighting capabilities.5 The most critical comparative warfighting advantage the United States enjoys relative to its adversaries is its technological edge in the conventional weapons realmeven as its hold may be weakening.6 Indeed, this is why adversaries prefer to contest the United States below the level of war, in the gray zone, and largely avoid direct military confrontation where they perceive a significant U.S. advantage.
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However, one notable distinction is Arts focus on the military instrument of power (chiefly nuclear weapons) as a tool of deterrence, whereas Nyes concept of deterrence implies a broader set of capabilities that could be marshalled to prevent unwanted behavior. Building dependable partnerships with private-sector entities who are vital to helping support military operations. , ed. This is why the commission recommends that DOD develop and designate a force structure element to serve as a threat-hunting capability across the entire DOD Information Network (DODIN), thus covering the full range of nonnuclear to nuclear force employment. Nikolaos Pissanidis, Henry Roigas, and Matthijs Veenendaal (Tallinn: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2016), 194, available at <, https://www.ccdcoe.org/uploads/2018/10/Art-12-Weapons-Systems-and-Cyber-Security-A-Challenging-Union.pdf, Weapon Systems Cybersecurity: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities, , GAO-19-128 (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2018), available at <, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-128.pdf, Lubold and Volz, Navy, Industry Partners Are Under Cyber Siege.. The second most common architecture is the control system network as a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) off the business LAN (see Figure 4). 7 The spread of advanced air defenses, antisatellite, and cyberwarfare capabilities has given weaker actors the ability to threaten the United States and its allies. , Adelphi Papers 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies. Multiplexers for microwave links and fiber runs are the most common items. Nearly every production control system logs to a database on the control system LAN that is then mirrored into the business LAN. It is common to find RTUs with the default passwords still enabled in the field. CISA cites misconfigurations and poor security controls as a common reason why hackers can get initial access to sensitive data or company systems due to critical infrastructure. If a dozen chemical engineers were tasked with creating a talcum powder plant, each of them would use different equipment and configure the equipment in a unique way. Through the mutual cooperation between industry and the military in securing information, the DoD optimizes security investments, secures critical information, and provides an . 41, no. 33 Austin Long, A Cyber SIOP? In that case, the security of the system is the security of the weakest member (see Figure 12). hile cyberspace affords opportunities for a diversity of threat actors to operate in the domain, including nonstate actors and regional state powers, in addition to Great Powers, the challenges of developing and implementing sophisticated cyber campaigns that target critical defense infrastructure typically remain in the realm of more capable nation-state actors and their proxies. All three are securable if the proper firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and application level privileges are in place. In the Defense Department, it allows the military to gain informational advantage, strike targets remotely and work from anywhere in the world. See the Cyberspace Solarium Commissions recent report, available at
Finally, DoD is still determining how best to address weapon systems cybersecurity," GAO said. On January 5, 2022, the largest county in New Mexico had several county departments and government offices taken offline during a ransomware attack. They make threat outcomes possible and potentially even more dangerous. Early this year, a criminal ring dubbed Carbanak cyber gang was discovered by the experts at Kaspersky Lab, the hackers have swiped over $1 Billion from banks worldwide The financial damage to the world economy due to cybercrime exceed 575 billion dollars, the figures are disconcerting if we consider that are greater than the GDP of many countries. Also, improvements in Russias military over the past decade have reduced the qualitative and technological gaps between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Objective. and Is Possible, in, Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies, , ed. April 29, 2019. In addition to assessing fielded systems vulnerabilities, DOD should enforce cybersecurity requirements for systems that are in development early in the acquisition life cycle, ensuring they remain an essential part of the front end of this process and are not bolted on later.64 Doing so would essentially create a requirement for DOD to institutionalize a continuous assessment process of weapons systems cyber vulnerabilities and annually report on these vulnerabilities, thereby sustaining its momentum in implementing key initiatives. Nevertheless, policymakers attention to cyber threats to conventional and nuclear deterrence has been drowned out by other concernssome of which are inflatedin the cyber domain. Fort Lesley J. McNair Subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest news and updates. The department is expanding its Vulnerability Disclosure Program to include all publicly accessible DOD information systems. Then, in part due to inconsistencies in compliance, verification, and enforcement in the cybersecurity standards established in DFARS, in 2019 DOD issued the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, which created new, tiered cybersecurity standards for defense contractors and was meant to build on the 2016 DFARS requirement.54 However, this has resulted in confusion about requirements, and the process for independently auditing and verifying compliance remains in nascent stages of development.55 At the same time, in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress took legislative action to ban government procurement of or contracting with entities that procure telecommunications technologies from specific Chinese firms, including Huawei and ZTE, and affiliated organizations. 8 Gordon Lubold and Dustin Volz, Navy, Industry Partners Are Under Cyber Siege by Chinese Hackers, Review Asserts, Wall Street Journal, March 2019, available at
More commercial technology will be integrated into current systems for maximum effectiveness in the ever-changing cybersphere. DODIG-2019-106 (Washington, DC: DOD, July 26, 2019), 2, available at
The DoD has further directed that cyber security technology must be integrated into systems because it is too expensive and impractical to secure a system after it has been designed The design of security for an embedded system is challenging because security requirements are rarely accurately identified at the start of the design process. Over the past year, a number of seriously consequential cyber attacks against the United States have come to light. , no. Common practice in most industries has a firewall separating the business LAN from the control system LAN. (Sood A.K. A potential impediment to implementing this recommendation is the fact that many cyber threats will traverse the boundaries of combatant commands, including U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Strategic Command, and the geographic combatant commands. 36 Defense Science Board, Task Force Report: Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat (Washington, DC: DOD, January 2013), available at