Day20-ForwardDefenseVersusPersistentEngagement

For today since I was still dealing with medical stuff, I decided to delve deeper into forward defense, persistent engagement, and deterrence. Largely working off of the article in 2019’s Journal of Cyber Security The Implications of Persistent and permanent engagement in cyberspace I started working through it and came to a few conclusions.

1. There’s too many buzzwords in cyberspace (but it’s academia/academia influenced so what else is there to expect).

2. A lot of the idea around persistent engagement (consistently imposing costs on adversaries in whatever reasonable means possible) is time and resource intensive.

3. Forward defense (Oxford’s definition: A U.S. strategic concept which calls for containing or repulsing military aggression as close to the original line of contact as possible) seems to largely rely on the idea of “fight them there, so we don’t have to fight them here” which is spurious to me.

4. This largely applies only in the context of APTs and larger nation state actors, depends on accurate information/attribution, and might have implications for broader networks/infosec.

5. A lot of things have to come together in order for a cohesive/nationwide cyber strategy to work.

While I think the concepts are important, the issues of so many complex moving pieces including adversary moves, US foreign/domestic policy, potential sanctions, various agencies, etc… there’s a lot that can go wrong and such concepts are likely to be oversold as a “new approach silver bullet” when it takes a lot of things working together to make progress on anything.

If anything I think this reinforces the importance of clear communication between everyone involved for the best outcomes as well as understanding that there will be tradeoffs and things may not turn out as well as one hopes.