The Pentagon has launched a preemptive strike against the Russian hackers who may have attacked the 2016 presidential election with social media influence campaigns. Numerous initiatives, including Harvard University’s Defending Digital Democracy Project, have educated officials on how to fortify elections against cyberattacks and encouraged social media companies to take down fake accounts. Despite these efforts, 67 percent of Americans consider that a foreign influence campaign, either by Russia or other governments, during the midterm elections is “very or somewhat” plausible.

In November 2016, the U.K. government launched its Active Cyber Defence (ACD) program with the intention of tackling “in a relatively automated [and transparent] way, a significant proportion of the cyber attacks that hit the U.K.” True to their word, a little over a year on, last week the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published a full and frank account (over 60 pages long) of their progress to date. The report itself is full of technical implementation details. But it’s useful to cut through the specifics to explain exactly what ACD is and highlight its successes—how the program could benefit the United States as well.

North Korea’s 3,000 to 6,000 hackers and the 10 to 20 percent of its military budget going toward online operations mean the country’s cyberthreat to the United States stands only behind that of China, Russia and Iran. If the current tensions continue to escalate, could the United States or North Korea use their cyber-capabilities as a “force multiplier” to conventional military systems?

According to U.S. cybersecurity company Symantec, a hacking campaign dubbed Dragonfly 2.0 successfully infiltrated U.S. power plants over the past two years. The latest spate of incidents has been particularly alarming because the hackers appear to have accessed control systems at a handful of U.S. facilities. Symantec’s report speculates about the hack’s “potential for sabotage” and “disruptive purposes,” but doesn’t identify the hackers’ origins, saying only that they are “clearly an accomplished attack group.” Other researchers believe the culprits are linked to the Russian government, dovetailing with Ukraine’s allegations that Moscow was behind hacks against its power grids in 2015 and again in 2016.