A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyber weapons has concluded that President Obama has the power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review. That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation’s first rules for how to defend, or retaliate, against a major cyber attack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the nation and, if the president approves, strike adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Officials said the new cyber policies have been guided by a decade of evolution in counterterrorism policy, particularly on the division of authority between the military and the intelligence agencies in deploying cyber weapons. But the intelligence agencies have the authority to carry out clandestine drone strikes and commando raids in places like Pakistan and Yemen, which are not declared war zones. <\/p>\n
Obama is known to have approved use of cyber weapons once, early in his presidency, when he ordered an escalating series of cyber attacks against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. <\/p>\n
Another senior official said it was quickly determined that the cyber weapons were so powerful that — like nuclear weapons — they should be unleashed only on the direct orders of the commander in chief. That means the administration has ruled out the use of “automatic” retaliation if a cyber attack on America’s infrastructure is detected, even if the virus is traveling at network speeds. During the attacks on Iran’s facilities, which the U.S. never acknowledged, Obama insisted that cyber weapons be targeted narrowly, so that they did not affect hospitals or power supplies. <\/p>\n
Link: http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/nation\/189605461.html?refer=y<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3450,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963\/revisions\/3450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}