Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Strategic Cyber Deterrence: The Active Cyber Defense Option

According to the FBI, about 4000 ransomware attacks happen every day. In the United States alone, victims lost $209 million to ransomware in the first quarter of 2016. 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. Further, recent reports on the Russian hacks into the Democratic National Committee and subsequent release of emails in a coercive campaign to apparently influence the U.S. Presidential Election have brought national attention to the inadequacy of cyber deterrence. The U.S. government seems incapable of creating an adequate strategy to alter the behavior of the wide variety of malicious actors seeking to inflict harm or damage through cyberspace. This book offers a systematic analysis of the various existing strategic cyber deterrence options and introduces the alternative strategy of active cyber defense. It examines the array of malicious actors operating in the domain, their methods of attack, and their motivations. 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. 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. 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. It shows how active cyber defense is technically capable and legally viable as an alternative strategy for the deterrence of cyber attacks. Review In the development of American cybersecurity policy, deterrence has simultaneously grown more important and more controversial, leaving policymakers who confront mounting cyber threats tempted by deterrent strategies shrouded in doubts about their effectiveness. 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. Instead, Jasper advocates for achieving strategic deterrence by combining robust, resilient cyber defenses with capabilities to engage in aggressive but calibrated countermeasures. 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. --David P. Fidler, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Cybersecurity, Council on Foreign Relations About the Author Scott Jasper, CAPT, USN (ret) is a Lecturer in the National Security Affairs Department at Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.