The FBI’s new strategy to establish costs for entities perpetrating cyberattacks will include supplying intelligence to the Department of Defense and related intelligence agencies to carry out offensive cyber operations, the director of the bureau told members of Congress.
“An important part of fighting back against our foreign adversaries in the cyber realm is offense as well as defense,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Thursday during an annual hearing on worldwide threats to the Homeland. “That’s a big part of this new FBI strategy that I rolled out.”
The strategy, which Wray announced Sep. 16 during the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Summit, is to “impose risk and consequences on cyber adversaries.”
Wray also pointed to a recent escalation of indictments against alleged cyber criminals, including those the FBI has tied to the governments of China, Iran and Russia during investigations where it sometimes partnered with CISA and the Treasury Department.
Wray added the cyber offense component in response to a question from Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. “I think we can agree the best defense is a good offense,” Romney said, asking whether the government is doing enough on that front.
“Sometimes, the way to maximise impact is through law enforcement action that we would take, sometimes it’s through sanctions,” Wray said. “But sometimes it’s through offensive cyber operations, and we are very focused on making sure that intelligence and information that we develop through our investigative work is shared with our partners to enable their operations offensively, so through our national cyber investigative joint task force we’re much more effective in partnering with the relevant [intelligence community] and DOD agencies on that.”
The Defense Science Board, a panel of ..
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