Should the U.S. allow companies to ‘hack back’ against foreign cyber spies?

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/23/should-the-u-s-allow-companies-to-hack-back-against-foreign-cyber-spies/

By Max Fisher
The Washington Post
May 23, 2013

Foreign hackers do remarkable damage by breaking into American 
companies, stealing intellectual property worth enormous amounts of 
money, swiping proprietary secrets for military technology or other uses 
and, in the case of some recent Chinese attacks, even exposing U.S. 
counterintelligence efforts. The Obama administration has made clear 
that it takes the threat seriously and is escalating efforts to stop it.

One suggestion increasingly floated in the private sector is to allow 
companies to “hack back.” Current U.S. law makes it illegal for private 
firms to launch retaliatory cyberattacks, and the issue is highly 
controversial. But it’s entering the mainstream.

A new report, from a private commission on intellectual property theft 
chaired by former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman and former 
director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, raised the possibility 
of changing the law to allow for hacking back. While it stopped short of 
directly advocating such attacks, it did call for a milder, legal form 
of hacking back and said the United States should consider changing the 
law if other measures fail.

It can be tough to talk about allowing corporations to run their own 
mini cyberwars because, like hacking itself, no one is exactly sure what 
sorts of norms will develop and where the technology will lead us. The 
conversations tend heavily toward the hypothetical. Advocates of 
“hacking back” point out that criminal and state-run hackers are only 
getting better, and that because they risk little by attacking purely 
defensive systems, they will simply persist until they succeed. 
Opponents warn that such a serious escalation could erode what few 
cyber-norms already exist, turning the Internet into a battlefield where 
not just rogue states and freelance criminals, but a lot very rich 
corporations, are invading privacy, stealing data and otherwise hacking 
for the specific purpose of doing damage.

[...]

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