Specifically, the potential for cyber operations to distort or degrade the ability of conventional or even nuclear capabilities to work as intended could undermine the credibility of deterrence due to a reduced capability rather than political will.17 Moreover, given the secret nature of cyber operations, there is likely to be information asymmetry between the deterring state and the ostensible target of deterrence if that target has undermined or holds at risk the deterring states capabilities without its knowledge. The power and growing reliance on AI generates a perfect storm for a new type of cyber-vulnerability: attacks targeted directly at AI systems and components. MAD Security recently collaborated with Design Interactive, a cutting-edge research and software development company trying to enhance cybersecurity to prevent cyber attacks. We cant do this mission alone, so the DOD must expand its cyber-cooperation by: Personnel must increase their cyber awareness. An attacker wishing control simply establishes a connection with the data acquisition equipment and issues the appropriate commands. Troops have to increasingly worry about cyberattacks while still achieving their missions, so the DOD needs to make processes more flexible. Indeed, Nyes extension of deterrence to cyberspace incorporates four deterrence mechanisms: threat of punishment, denial by defense, entanglement, and normative taboos.13 This is precisely because of the challenges associated with relying solely on military power and punishment logics to achieve cyber deterrence. DOD must additionally consider incorporating these considerations into preexisting table-top exercises and scenarios around nuclear force employment while incorporating lessons learned into future training.67 Implementing these recommendations would enhance existing DOD efforts and have a decisive impact on enhancing the security and resilience of the entire DOD enterprise and the critical weapons systems and functions that buttress U.S. deterrence and warfighting capabilities. Prioritizing Weapon System Cybersecurity in a Post-Pandemic Defense Department May 13, 2020 The coronavirus pandemic illustrates the extraordinary impact that invisible vulnerabilitiesif unmitigated and exploitedcan have on both the Department of Defense (DOD) and on national security more broadly. The costs can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands, payable to cybercriminals in Bitcoin. Additionally, cyber-enabled espionage conducted against these systems could allow adversaries to replicate cutting-edge U.S. defense technology without comparable investments in research and development and could inform the development of adversary offset capabilities. . Monitors network to actively remediate unauthorized activities. 3 John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, Pub. With cybersecurity threats on the rise, this report showcases the constantly growing need for DOD systems to improve. 1 Summary: Department of Defense Cyber Strategy 2018 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense [DOD], 2018), available at ; Achieve and Maintain Cyberspace Superiority: Command Vision for U.S. Cyber Command (Washington, DC: U.S. Cyber Command, 2018), available at ; An Interview with Paul M. Nakasone, Joint Force Quarterly 92 (1st Quarter 2019), 67. Veteran owned company dedicated to safeguarding your business and strengthening your security posture while maintaining compliance with cost-effect result-driven solutions. The Department of Defense provides the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation's security. Relatedly, adversary campaigns to conduct cyber-enabled intellectual property theft against the U.S. military and the defense industrial base are also a concern because they continue to cause staggering losses of national security information and intellectual property. Therefore, urgent policy action is needed to address the cyber vulnerabilities of key weapons systems and functions. Joint Force Quarterly 102. The consequences are significant, particularly in the nuclear command and control realm, because not employing a capability could undermine positive and negative control over nuclear weapons and inevitably the stability of nuclear deterrence. 57 National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Supply Chain Risk Management: Reducing Threats to Key U.S. Supply Chains (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2020), available at . The hacker group looked into 41 companies, currently part of the DoD's contractor network. Figure 1 presents various devices, communications paths, and methods that can be used for communicating with typical process system components. , ed. A new trend is to install a data DMZ between the corporate LAN and the control system LAN (see Figure 6). Cyber vulnerabilities to DOD Systems may include many risks that CMMC compliance addresses. 2 The United States has long maintained strategic ambiguity about how to define what constitutes a use of force in any domain, including cyberspace, and has taken a more flexible stance in terms of the difference between a use of force and armed attack as defined in the United Nations charter. 2. 3 (January 2017), 45. See, for example, Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 19962017, le A. Flournoy, How to Prevent a War in Asia,, June 18, 2020; Christopher Layne, Coming Storms: The Return of Great-Power War,, Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 13, 2018), available at, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, (Washington, DC: The White House, December 2017), 27, available at <, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf, Daniel R. Coats, Annual Threat Assessment Opening Statement, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 29, 2019, available at <, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2019-01-29-ATA-Opening-Statement_Final.pdf. Upholding cyberspace behavioral norms during peacetime. For example, China is the second-largest spender on research and development (R&D) after the United States, accounting for 21 percent of the worlds total R&D spending in 2015. Most of these events are not reported to the public, and the threats and incidents to ICS are not as well-known as enterprise cyber threats and incidents. 20 See, for example, Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 19962017 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2015); Michle A. Flournoy, How to Prevent a War in Asia, Foreign Affairs, June 18, 2020; Christopher Layne, Coming Storms: The Return of Great-Power War, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020; Daniel R. Coats, Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 13, 2018), available at https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2018-ATA---Unclassified-SSCI.pdf. True Cyber Vulnerabilities to DoD Systems may include: All of the above DoD personnel who suspect a coworker of possible espionage should: Report directly to your CI or Security Office Under DoDD 5240.06 Reportable Foreign Intelligence Contacts, Activities, Indicators and Behaviors; which of the following is not reportable? Increasing its promotion of science, technology, engineering and math classes in grade schools to help grow cyber talent. While the Pentagon report has yet to be released, a scathing report on Defense Department weapons systems [2] published early this October by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) [] , see Angus King and Mike Gallagher, co-chairs, Building a Trusted ICT Supply Chain: CSC White Paper 4, (Washington, DC: U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission, October 2020), available at <, https://www.solarium.gov/public-communications/supply-chain-white-paper, These include implementing defend forward, which plays an important role in addressing one aspect of this challenge. Specifically, in Section 1647 of the FY16 NDAA, which was subsequently updated in Section 1633 of the FY20 NDAA, Congress directed DOD to assess the cyber vulnerabilities of each major weapons system.60 Although this process has commenced, gaps remain that must be remediated. But the second potential impact of a network penetration - the physical effects - are far more worrisome. 9 Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, Deterrence and the Cold War, Political Science Quarterly 110, no. Risks stemming from nontechnical vulnerabilities are entirely overlooked in strategies and policies for identifying and remediating cyber vulnerabilities in DOD weapons systems. Receive security alerts, tips, and other updates. As illustrated in Figure 1, there are many ways to communicate with a CS network and components using a variety of computing and communications equipment. Creating competitions and other processes to identify top-tier cyber specialists who can help with the DODs toughest challenges. Task Force Report: Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat, (Washington, DC: DOD, January 2013), available at <, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/docs/Cyber-081.pdf, Audit of the DoDs Management of the Cybersecurity Risks for Government Purchase Card Purchases of the Commercial Off-the-Shelf Items, , Report No. The controller unit communicates to a CS data acquisition server using various communications protocols (structured formats for data packaging for transmission). The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) is the most significant attempt ever undertaken by Congress to improve national cybersecurity and protect U.S. critical infrastructure from nation-state, non-state, and criminal behavior. These include the SolarWinds breach,1 ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline2 and the JBS meat processing company,3 and a compromise of the email systems of the U.S. Agency for International Development.4 U.S. officials have indicated their belief that Russia either sponsored . cyber vulnerabilities to dod systems may include On May 20, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) posted a request for information (RFI) for cyber vulnerability services. There is a need for support during upgrades or when a system is malfunctioning. 12 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Deterrence and Dissuasion in Cyberspace, International Security 41, no. large versionFigure 14: Exporting the HMI screen. The FY21 NDAA makes important progress on this front. The ultimate objective is to enable DOD to develop a more complete picture of the scope, scale, and implications of cyber vulnerabilities to critical weapons systems and functions. large versionFigure 7: Dial-up access to the RTUs. Moreover, the process of identifying interdependent vulnerabilities should go beyond assessing technical vulnerabilities to take a risk management approach to drive prioritization given the scope and scale of networked systems. JFQ. The objective of this audit was to determine whether DoD Components took action to update cybersecurity requirements for weapon systems in the Operations and Support (O&S) phase of the acquisition life cycle, based on publicly acknowledged or known cybersecurity threats and intelligence-based cybersecurity threats. (Alexandria, VA: National Science Foundation, 2018), O-1; Scott Boston et al., Assessing the Conventional Force Imbalance in Europe: Implications for Countering Russian Local Superiority, Gordon Lubold and Dustin Volz, Navy, Industry Partners Are Under Cyber Siege by Chinese Hackers, Review Asserts,, https://www.wsj.com/articles/navy-industry-partners-are-under-cyber-siege-review-asserts-11552415553. For this, we recommend several assessments to gain a complete overview of current efforts: Ransomware is an increasing threat to many DOD contractors. a. 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. For additional definitions of deterrence, see Glenn H. Snyder, Deterrence and Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Robert Jervis, Deterrence Theory Revisited, World Politics 31, no. Holding DOD personnel and third-party contractors more accountable for slip-ups. large versionFigure 4: Control System as DMZ. 23 For some illustrative examples, see Robert Jervis, Some Thoughts on Deterrence in the Cyber Era, Journal of Information Warfare 15, no. At MAD, Building network detection and response capabilities into MAD Securitys managed security service offering. None of the above However, selected components in the department do not know the extent to which users of its systems have completed this required training. Nikolaos Pissanidis, Henry Roigas, and Matthijs Veenendaal (Tallinn: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2016), 194, available at . The Department of Defense (DOD) strategic concept of defend forward and U.S. Cyber Commands concept of persistent engagement are largely directed toward this latter challenge. 3 (January 2017), 45. , Adelphi Papers 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies. What is Cyber vulnerabilities? While military cyber defenses are formidable, civilian . The Pentagon's concerns are not limited to DoD systems. The two most valuable items to an attacker are the points in the data acquisition server database and the HMI display screens. Given that Congress has already set a foundation for assessing cyber vulnerabilities in weapons systems, there is an opportunity to legislatively build on this progress. In the case of WannaCry, the ransomware possessed the ability to infect entire connected networks from the entry point of a single vulnerable computer meaning that one vulnerability was enough to paralyze the entire system. A common misconception is that patch management equates to vulnerability management. The objective would be to improve the overall resilience of the systems as well as to identify secondary and tertiary dependencies, with a focus on rapid remediation of identified vulnerabilities. Control systems are vulnerable to cyber attack from inside and outside the control system network. And, if deterrence fails, cyber operations to disrupt or degrade the functioning of kinetic weapons systems could compromise mission assurance during crises and conflicts. But where should you start? Users are shown instructions for how to pay a fee to get the decryption key. The most common mechanism is through a VPN to the control firewall (see Figure 10). 5 For a notable exception, see Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay, eds., Cross-Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Research in vulnerability analysis aims to improve ways of discovering vulnerabilities and making them public to prevent attackers from exploiting them. 2 (Summer 1995), 157181. Foreign Intelligence Entity (FIE) is defined in DoD Directive 5240.06 as "any known or suspected foreign organization, person, or group (public, private, or . There are 360 million probes targeted at Defense Department networks each day, compared to the 1 million probes an average major U.S. bank gets per month." This number dwarfs even the newer . An official website of the United States government Here's how you know. Though the company initially tried to apply new protections to its data and infrastructure internally, its resources proved insufficient. 64 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. 13 Nye, Deterrence and Dissuasion, 5455. 6395, 116th Cong., 2nd sess., 1940. (London: Macmillan, 1989); Robert Powell, Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility. Managing Clandestine Military Capabilities in Peacetime Competition, International Security 44, no. For instance, deterrence may have more favorable prospects when it focuses on deterring specific types of behavior or specific adversaries rather than general cyber deterrence.30, Notably, there has been some important work on the feasibility of cross-domain deterrence as it pertains to the threat of employing noncyber kinetic capabilities to deter unwanted behavior in cyberspace. Off-the-shelf tools can perform this function in both Microsoft Windows and Unix environments. 66 HASC, William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, H.R. John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, Pub. A system could be exploited through a single vulnerability, for example, a single SQL Injection attack could give an attacker full control over sensitive data. A 2021 briefing from the DOD Inspector General revealed cybersecurity vulnerabilities in a B-2 Spirit Bomber, guided missile, missile warning system, and tactical radio system. 114-92, 20152016, available at <, https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ92/PLAW-114publ92.pdf, William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 202. Cybersecurity Personnel who secure, defend, and preserve data, networks, net-centric capabilities, and other designated systems by ensuring appropriate security controls and measures are in place, and taking internal defense actions. Individual weapons platforms do not in reality operate in isolation from one another. 42 Lubold and Volz, Navy, Industry Partners Are Under Cyber Siege.. Often administrators go to great lengths to configure firewall rules, but spend no time securing the database environment. 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