How the United States Lost to Hackers

This discussion has been ongoing in security for a couple of decades. The reason we didn't get traction on fixing it was because our approach to mitigating risk interfered with opportunity and growth. Imo, the U.S. is losing its place in the world because it can't assert itself the way it used to, as a direct consequence of there being zero-cost to an adversary retaliating by creating domestic civil unrest using metro area power outages and water system compromises from cyber attacks. Think Texas power outages last month, but longer, and in LA, NYC, Chicago, Baltimore, or a version of last years riot season with blackouts.

It's harder to mobilize an army, let alone a draft, when your people are rioting and looting for lack of basic services. The good news is we won't see another personnel heavy gulf war or vietnam again, but the terrible news is adversaries know it's almost democratically impossible for the U.S. to fight a total ground war anymore and this will embolden regional border conflicts where raw numbers of infantry soldiers are an advantage. See China's current aggression in international waters and on its border with India as an example where there is a hard ceiling on the level of U.S. intervention because cyber has unbalanced the risk/reward.

Perhaps its only option is to keep escalating aggression and putting pressure on adversaries so they don't have the attention to devote to their regional ambitions, where the role changes from global cop, to a global "broken windows" and "stop and frisk" policing policy.

Cyber defense seems basically impossible.

Actually securing systems would require a massive rethink of systems architecture and replacing many hundreds of millions or billions of lines of existing code.

MAD doesn't work with non-state actors, and it only works with state actors if you're actually willing to go to the mat, which I don't think the US is.

So what does that leave? Hope? Not much of a strategy.

Zero points made. Zero answers given.

The answer: a huge number of foreign citizens, possibly agents, nobody knows, working in the US tech sector, and several domestic agencies that each separately and secretly compel those companies to pay those employees to install back doors, and then kick them out of the country in exchange for a new batch of younger and cheaper employees.

I remember when I used to think that hackers ‘found’ bugs. Silly.

It’s a really important topic for the media to cover, but the title is pure clickbait.

They keep looking at it like the whole thing is about hackers and not crappy software

I guess you the Times needs to use clickbait to get traffic same as anyone else. A better title might be: ‘Mercenaries Undermine US Cybersecurity’.

We have one of the world's top governmental cybersecurity organizations, but they would rather use that experience to hack us than protect us.