Cyber Project

Trey Herr discusses what proliferation looks like in cyberspace: someone writes a piece of malware, a third party finds it, adapts it, adds in some of their own code or that from an open source project …et voila, a new piece of malware is born. This latest epidemic is based on a commonly used ransomware, combined with a modified version of the NSA’s leaked exploit, and tied together with some new encryption functionality and part of an open source security tool.

Postdoctoral Fellow Ben Buchanan was interviewed by Alyza Sebanius for The Atlantic on June 28, 2017. In his new book, The Cybersecurity Dilemma, Dr. Buchanan argues that the line between offensive and defensive attacks is far from clear.

On June 28, Nicholas Burns testified before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in European elections. He called President Trump's response to Russia's cyber attacks on the U.S. democratic system both "dismaying and objectionable." He says it's the "president's duty to be skeptical of Russia and that his refusal to take action is "a dereliction of his basic duty to defend the country."

Former US Ambassador to NATO and Bush administration State Department official Nicholas Burns accused President Donald Trump of a "dereliction of the basic duty to defend the country" for his apparent disinterest in Russia's meddling in the 2016 US election.

If more companies get serious about cybersecurity, the internet ecosystem will be safer for everyone.

Malicious software is adapted, stolen, bought, and used everyday on a global scale. There are better ways to counter this proliferation than export controls. Policymakers should strengthen incentives for researchers and the private sector to rapidly identify software vulnerabilities, disclose them to developers, patch those vulnerabilities, and adopt those patches. Building on previous debates, this paper makes specific recommendations to shorten the lifecycle of vulnerabilities and improve the short term health of the software security ecosystem.

Few areas of national policymaking will remain untouched by artificial intelligence. Though the challenges it poses are complex, the opportunities it offers are tremendous. Simply put, machine learning is too important to ignore.

Anne Boustead suggests four questions that Senator Wyden should ask following Director Coats' argument that quantifying the collection of U.S. person communications under Section 702 would exhaust agency resources and threaten privacy rights.

A new report from Bloomberg this week reveals that Russian cyberattackers were much more involved in the US presidential election than previously publicized. CNN reached out to Michael Sulmeyer, director of the Belfer Center's Cyber Security Project for his take on what the Bloomberg report reveals about the deeper vulnerabilities in our electoral system.

China's new cybersecurity law is part of a worrying global trend towards Internet Balkanisation, writes Scott Shackelford.