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Here's what John Bolton had to say about cybersecurity policy in his new book


From: InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 06:21:05 +0000 (UTC)

https://www.cyberscoop.com/john-bolton-book-cybersecurity-nspm-13-crowdstrike/

By Shannon Vavra
CYBERSCOOP
June 22, 2020

In his new book, former national security adviser John Bolton says that squabbling amongst Trump administration officials hobbled the White House’s efforts to issue new policies that shaped the U.S. government’s offensive and defense cyber-operations.

The book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” which CyberScoop obtained, provides an insider’s view of the U.S. government’s largely secretive approach to revamping cyber policy in the last two years. Aside from cyber-operations, Bolton paints President Donald Trump as preoccupied and angered by cybersecurity-related issues, as well as all too willing to use hacking to prop up his political goals in negotiations with China and Ukraine.

“We needed to do two things: first, we needed a Trump Administration cyber strategy, and second, we needed to scrap the Obama-era [offensive cyber-operations] rules and replace them with a more agile, expeditious decision-making structure,” Bolton writes of his time negotiating new policies with national security and intelligence officials in 2018. “Unfortunately, bureaucratic inertia, turf fights, and some genuine unresolved issues paralyzed the Trump Administration, month after month.”

Bolton writes that the Obama administration’s approach to fending off hacking from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea had been criticized for not being aggressive enough. In order to better deter them, the Trump administration had set its sights on giving U.S. military hackers more leeway to hit back.

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