#RSAC: What Governments Should Do to Respond to Nation State Attacks

Nation states are actively attacking digital and internet-connected assets, but whether or not the US and other governments are doing enough to stop those attacks is a burning question that was debated in a session at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Sometimes there is a tendency for individuals or even organizations to question whether nation state cybersecurity attacks matter, which is something that Tom Corcoran, head of cybersecurity at Farmers Insurance Group, disagreed with. In his view, whether we like it or not, cyber space attacks matter to everyone now. To reinforce his point, he cited a famous quote attributed to Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky at the turn of the twentieth century: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

What Nation States Want

The reasons why different nations engage in cybersecurity attacks are wide and varied though Stewart Baker, partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, summarized the key threat actors succinctly.

“The Chinese just want to steal everything, Iran is out for revenge and the Russians just want to screw us up,” he said.

Ambassador Timo Koster, ambassador-at-large, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, had a somewhat more nuanced view on why different countries engage in cybersecurity attacks. In Koster’s view, there is a link between the nations that attack others over the internet, and what they do to their own people.

“They ar ..

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