The Obama administration policy of avoiding assertive action against foreign hackers came under fire from Congress last week, and is raising concerns that the White House is failing to protect the country from large-scale cyber attacks.
Christopher Painter, the State Department’s coordinator for cyber security, defended the administration’s strategy for deterring massive data breaches, like China’s pilfering of sensitive personnel records on 22 million federal workers, known as “deterrence by denial.”
This strategy bears no relationship to the strategic doctrine of deterring foreign nuclear attacks by threatening to inflict massive nuclear blasts against any state that threatens to use its nuclear arms on the United States or its allies.
Instead, “deterrence by denial” refers to a defensive effort to protect information networks against an onslaught of increasingly sophisticated and innovative cyber intrusions in the hope that foreign data thieves will eventually give up trying—rather than any effort to actually deter such attacks before they occur.
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