U.S. Government Responses to State-Sponsored Cyberattacks (2014-2024)

What is the appropriate response to a state-backed cybersecurity breach? Most governments make no public response whatsoever, choosing in many cases not to even acknowledge the incident has occurred, but for more than a decade, the U.S. Government has experimented with a variety of different legal, technical, and economic retaliatory tactics. This talk will review three different sets of responses by the United States: indictments of state-sponsored hackers, technical take-downs of state-affiliated hacking infrastructure, and economic sanctions aimed at cutting off revenue to state-backed entities responsible for cyberattacks. In addition to describing the history of how each of these strategies has evolved over the past decade and how they have been used both separately and in concert, the talk will also consider the relative merits and drawbacks of each approach and how and why the United States’ approach to responding to state-sponsored cyber activity has diverged from that of many other countries.

Josephine Wolff is Associate Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her research interests include liability for cybersecurity incidents, international Internet governance, cyber-insurance, cybersecurity workforce development, and the economics of information security. Her first book You'll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018. Her second book Cyberinsurance Policy: Rethinking Risk in an Age of Ransomware, Computer Fraud, Data Breaches, and Cyberattacks was published by MIT Press in 2022. Her writing on cybersecurity has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Wired. Prior to joining Fletcher, she was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at the New America Cybersecurity Initiative and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

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