Countering Cyberattacks Without a Playbook

What the Sony hack has helped bring into focus: a shadow war of nearly constant, low-level digital conflict, somewhere in the netherworld between what President Obama called “cybervandalism” and what others might call digital terrorism.

In that murky world, the attacks are carefully calibrated to be well short of war. The attackers are hard to identify with certainty, and the evidence cannot be made public. The counterstrike, if there is one, is equally hard to discern and often unsatisfying. The damage is largely economic and psychological. Deterrence is hard to establish. And because there are no international treaties or norms about how to use digital weapons -- indeed, no acknowledgment by the United States government that it has ever used them itself -- there are no rules about how to fight this kind of conflict.

[Dec 24]