US government to let private security firms hack foreign cybercriminals
The Trump administration is setting up a program that would, for the first time, authorize private security firms to conduct offensive cyber operations against overseas criminal groups, under oversight from the Justice and Homeland Security departments.
President Donald Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum on Thursday directing the National Coordination Center (NCC), which sits under the Homeland Security Task Force, to build a program aimed at countering foreign transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that operate in cyberspace. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security will oversee the effort.
Private firms brought in for the first time
The core of the new program is enlisting private-sector companies to carry out what the memo calls Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations against groups that target the US government, US persons, or US interests. A fact sheet released alongside the memo listed the kinds of crimes eligible for this treatment: ransomware, sextortion schemes, phishing campaigns, financial fraud, and impersonation scams.
A transnational criminal organization is defined in the memo as any foreign group engaged in cyber-enabled crime against the United States that is not an institutional arm of a foreign government or operating under that government's direction.
Key details still undefined
This marks the first time the federal government has formally authorized private companies to launch offensive cyber operations against hackers based abroad. The memo appears to allow participating firms to deploy spyware or conduct attacks meant to destroy the data or systems of these criminal organizations. It also does not rule out tactics such as using encryption to lock targets out of their own networks or carrying out distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Until now, private companies have been barred from taking such offensive actions without prior court authorization. Many aspects of how the new program will actually work remain unspecified.
