WASHINGTON, October 28 (RIA Novosti) — The United States’ offensive cyber capabilities are quite substantial and other countries know it, a former senior counsel at the NSA and the head of the US counterintelligence under the Director of National Intelligence Joel Brenner told RIA Novosti Tuesday.
“The offensive [cyber] capabilities of the United States in this regard are quite substantial, and other countries know,” Brenner told RIA Novosti at a Tuesday cybersecurity conference.
Brenner was asked whether the US was stuck with strictly a defensive posture toward cybercrime and cyber-attacks, and he pointed to the two largest perpetrators of cybercrime against US entities, nationstates and criminal networks.
“The problems are different in dealing with large countries than dealing with transnational terrorist groups, who aren’t deferrable in quite the same way.” According to Brenner, “none of those groups at present has the sort of first quality or even second quality cyber capabilities” that would compare with the US and other large nation states.
According to data, collected by Verizon in 2013, organized crime makes up the largest contingent of external cyber-attacks, accounting for 55 percent of known security breaches. Next, nation state or state-affiliated actors comprise 21 percent of such incidents.
Over the recent documented period, the number of security breaches related to economic or financial data has been decreasing, while cases of espionage have been steadily rising, according to Brenner. On Tuesday, a report published by Novetta Solutions exposed a sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored cyberespionage network.
Brenner concluded that given the threats, posed by both state and criminal actors, “we’re walking backwards on defense right now.” He further noted in his presentation to the cybersecurity forum that those, who thought the state of cyber defenses in the United States are better now than they were ten years ago “is dead wrong,” and he called for increased monitoring and identifying of internal and external threats and deeper network resiliency.
