Strategic Cyber Deterrence: The Active Cyber Defense Option

It also provides answers on what is being done, and what could be done, by the government and industry to convince malicious actors that their attacks will not succeed and that risk of repercussions exists. This book offers a systematic analysis of the various existing strategic cyber deterrence options and introduces the alternative strategy of active cyber defense. In response, the book offers the option of adopting a strategy of active cyber defense that combines internal systemic resilience to halt cyber attack progress with external disruption capacities to thwart malicious actors’ objectives. The U.S. Even worse is the threat to critical infrastructure, as seen by the malware infections at electrical distribution companies in Ukraine that caused outages to 225,000 customers in late 2015. In the United States alone, victims lost $209 million to ransomware in the first quarter of 2016. Presidential Election have brought national attention to the inadequacy of cyber deterrence. Traditional deterrence strategies of retaliation, denial and entanglement appear to lack the necessary conditions of capability, credibly, and communications due to these malicious actors’ advantages in cyberspace. It examines the array of malicious actors operating in the domain, their methods of attack, and their motivations. According to the FBI, about 4000 ransomware attacks happen every day. Further, recent reports on the Russian hacks into the Democratic National Committee and

Fidler, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Cybersecurity, Council on Foreign Relations) . His engaging contribution carefully cuts through the prevailing “something must be done” approaches to deterrence in cybersecurity and offers a strategy tailored to the challenges and capabilities that define the cyber realm. Instead, Jasper advocates for achieving strategic deterrence by combining robust, resilient cyber defenses with capabilities to engage in aggressive but calibrated countermeasures. In Strategic Cyber Deterrence, Scott Jasper breaks down the theory and practice of deterrence within the realm of cyberspace and argues that the traditional approaches of deterrence by retaliation, denial, and entanglement fail as strategic options. (David P. In the development of American cybersecurity policy, deterrence has simultaneously grown more important and more controversial, leaving policymakers w

Scott Jasper, CAPT, USN (ret) is a Lecturer in the National Security Affairs Department at Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.