After reading a Facebook comment on “Navy, Industry Partners Are ‘Under Cyber Siege’ by Chinese Hackers, Review Asserts,” I’m compelled to respond.
I work a lot with the Navy (and the DOD as a whole) as a vendor. I spent 26 years in the intelligence community as a contractor running datacenter operations, transitioning to cybersecurity in the late 1990s.
From my past insider experience to my now outside-in view, “process” is one of the biggest hurdles to effectively defending a network. Process frustrates the talented cyber warriors and process is what managers hide behind when a breach that happened six months or more ago is finally detected.
Process = regulations.
Processes are generally put into place in response to past incidents. Simple knee jerk reactions. But things change. We need to review and change our processes and regulations, and, in some cases completely tear them apart to allow our talented cyber warriors to defend our networks. New regulations would allow them to get into the fight. They may even remain in their jobs longer, rather than leaving for industry — taking expensive training and irreplaceable knowledge with them.
One of my coworkers was on a Cyber Protection Team (CPT) for a major military command. He left to work in a commercial SOC. At one point, his team pitched their services to the top echelon of a service branch. As they introduced my coworker, he was asked why he left military service. My coworker, being an Army Ranger, and then an enlisted sailor, is pretty direct. He said, “Because you’re not in the fight. You’re more worried about the policy and process, while I’m here every day fighting the Russians, Chinese and Iranians.” One officer turns to the others and said, “This is exactly what I mean.”
Too much process and regulation restrict the agility needed for prompt incident response. To resolve incidents quickly (and minimize damage), cyber warriors require trust from their leadership. Trust in their abilities to make quick decisions, be creative, and quickly deploy lessons learned.
The very cyber warriors whose decisions they question are the same ones they blame when things go wrong.
As always, Target is a prime example. It was a low-level cyber warrior who found the “oddity” when doing a packet capture review. He notified Target leadership. But they didn’t act. They ignored him until their credit cards were on the dark web. Then, they went back to the young cyber warrior and fired him. He asked why. After all, he identified the problem first. The response from his leadership was: “Well, you didn’t make your point strong enough for us to take action on.”
The military has the same mentality. But, since many of them have even less knowledge of real-world hacks then private sector management, they take even more time to make decisions. Another friend told me about a time when he was on active duty and found evidence that someone had exploited the network. When he reported it, his leadership kicked it back because there was “not enough evidence.” He then broke down the exploit and was able to provide the address and phone number of the adversary in Russia. Finally, they acted, but his CO did not want to report it to higher HQ because he was afraid of the fallout.
My friend reminded his CO that they were part of a carrier strike group, and all their data was incorporated into the fleet. Once again, he was ordered to fix it and not report it. He really believed that the only way to protect the group would be to send an anonymous email. This cyber warrior had to choose between disobeying orders and protecting our country.
Let’s not put our talented cyber warriors into this trap. Process and regulations need to be flexible enough to allow these people to protect our country – quickly.
Learn more about RedSeal’s support of cyber protection teams and our approach to digital resilience in the DOD.
