Could Obama’s Threat of Retaliation against Russia Lead to Cyberwar?
Online attacks are unpredictable and hard to control, leading to worries that White House cyber rattling could quickly escalate
By Larry Greenemeier on October 18, 2016
Late last week Obama administration officials used NBC News to send Moscow a cryptic threat: The U.S. government is “contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action” against Russia for allegedly interfering in the upcoming U.S. elections. Anonymous sources cited in the NBC story offered no details about what the U.S. might d, but said the White House has asked the CIA to cook up a “clandestine” cyber strategy “designed to harass and embarrass” Russian leadership, including Pres. Vladimir Putin.
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Scientific American spoke with O. Sami Saydjari—a former senior U.S. Department of Defense cyber expert who now runs a consultancy called the Cyber Defense Agency—about why the government is suggesting cyber retaliation, what such a response might look like, and the dangers of online attacks escalating into cyber war or something much worse.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Why would the Obama administration publicly announce that it is contemplating a large-scale yet covert digital offensive against Russia?
It’s clearly public posturing for some effect, although it’s not yet clear what that effect will be. This is a cyber version of mutually assured destruction—or, maybe more accurately in this case, mutually assured damage. You damage our cyberspace, we’ll damage your cyberspace. But that’s a dangerous game. Cyberspace is a murky area: It’s not clear who your enemy is, and the outcome of your actions isn’t easy to control. Put another way, when you rattle your saber in cyberspace it’s not clear what you’re rattling, at what you’re rattling and whether you’ll be effective if you do rattle it.
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