Open letter to President Obama on the eve of his Summit with President Xi

Dear President Obama,

I've spent the last five years working exclusively in the identification and cataloging of threat actors in cyberspace. I've participated in incident response investigations for some of the world's largest companies and have briefed both U.S. intelligence agencies and those of five foreign countries on the complexity of the cyber threat landscape as well as information warfare planning, research & development, and execution of strategy by both Russia and China. I host three highly regarded executive cyber security conferences each year, and my book Inside Cyber Warfare (in its 2nd edition) is used as a text by the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology in its cyber warfare certification program.

While I'm enthusiastic about your upcoming meeting with President Xi on mutual cyber security concerns, I'm worried that the strong anti-China sentiment on the Hill and in print by the New York Times, Bloomberg and the Washington Post will have a polarizing effect on your talks. Much of the evidence being touted as pointing to China's acts of cyber espionage is a conflation of multi-state and non-state actors engaging with the same target companies that China is interested in. I personally know of Russian hackers who prefer to attack their targets in different countries via a compromised Chinese computer because there are so many of them and they're so easy to exploit.

While there is a propensity among government officials and infosec experts to blame China first for any attack involving U.S. intellectual property, they often do so without any hard evidence. Chinese IP addresses don't qualify as evidence anymore than U.S. IP addresses do. Open source hacker tools written by Chinese developers and posted on the Web for anyone to download and use cannot be considered evidence of Chinese government involvement. And President Xi will certainly make the same point. While there's no question that the Chinese government engages in cyber espionage, it is not the only nation that does so and it is certainly not solely responsible for the estimated $300 billion in stolen U.S. IP.

Rather than accusing China of something that cannot be proved, I believe that U.S. interests can best be served by cooperating with China on the identification and prosecution of non-state actors who operate in Chinese and U.S. IP space. Media stories and self-serving infosec reports to the contrary, not all Chinese hackers work for the PLA. There are many independent hackers in China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Taiwan and other countries who make money stealing IP and selling it to whomever is willing to pay. Some of these same hackers may be involved in attacking Chinese government websites; particularly those in India, Tibet, and Taiwan. While conventional wisdom groups hackers into silos (Russians rob banks; Chinese steal IP; Iranians attack power companies), that's not a realistic nor fact-based portrayal of the international cyber threat landscape.

There are many ways that China is benefiting from U.S. technology transfer such as their successful campaign to provide monetary incentives for U.S. multinationals to open R&D labs in Shanghai and Beijing (which now number over 1200). These labs employ Chinese engineers who learn U.S. technological secrets and then leave to work for Chinese companies; taking that proprietary knowledge with them. Those same employees have trusted access on their respective corporate intranets. There's no reason for the Chinese government to execute sloppy hacking operations against a U.S. company when that company has offices in Bejing or Shanghai. Access to their IP is a given.

If you and President Xi could reach an agreement to cooperate on reducing the activities of independent  non-state actors that have attacked both the U.S. and Chinese businesses and government organizations, it would benefit the U.S. in the following ways:

1. Chinese threat data is of great interest to U.S. law enforcement organizations.
2. A reduction of non-state actors currently cluttering up the threat landscape would make it easier to identify state-run cyber espionage operations.
3. The biggest threat to both Chinese and U.S. critical infrastructure is from non-state actors and, in the future, those may include terrorist groups. 

Mr. President, in my opinion, attempting to shame or threaten China over its hacking activities when the available evidence is so easily dismissed makes the U.S. look weak and ineffective. Enlisting China as an ally to identify and interdict the activities of independent threat actors would result in a win for both nations.

I hope this open letter finds it's way to your desk and that it helps inform your strategy.

Warm Regards,

Mr. Jeffrey Carr
CEO, Taia Global, Inc.
Author, Inside Cyber Warfare
Founder, Suits and Spooks conference

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Learn how to Take Down a State's Power Grid, Transportation System, and Other Critical Infrastructure

President Obama wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal last Friday which described a catastrophic attack against the transportation and water sectors of our nation's critical infrastructure. He then pressed for passage of comprehensive cyber security legislation. While Congress and the White House have a sense of what might occur, they don't seem to be aware of the technical vulnerabilities involved or they would know that none of the current cyber security bills pending in Congress could stop such an attack even if they were enacted into law.


Therefore I've decided to invite some of the world's leading experts in protecting critical infrastructure to present how they would mount an offensive attack against their respective industry sectors at the next Suits and Spooks anti-conference to be held October 18th, 2012 in Brookline, MA. For obvious reasons, this event will be closed to the press and none of the presentations will be made public. 


One of our speakers will be Dale Peterson, the founder of Digital Bond, Inc., a control system consulting and research firm that also hosts the most visited SCADA security site and the S4 conference. He began work on control system security in 2000 after beginning his security career as an NSA cryptanalyst. In his presentation for Suits and Spooks Boston, Dale will provide detailed scenarios on how how an adversary would take out thousands of power plants around the world or large parts of the electric transmission system. 


Another one of our speakers will be Rob DuBois, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL and current manager for Red Team operations at a U.S. defense contractor. Since the threats aren't only digital, Rob will walk the audience through how a highly trained team would mount a physical attack against a key facility.


Our keynote speaker will be Dr. David A. Bray who currently serves as Principal Strategist and Senior National Intelligence Service Executive with the National Commission for Review of Research and Development Programs of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Prior to joining ISE, Dr. Bray served as a strategist at the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Science and Technology Policy Institute. In 2009, he deployed to Afghanistan as a Special Advisor to STRATEGIC EFFECTS for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces Afghanistan, with the task of helping to “think differently” on critical strategic efforts. Dr. Bray also served as IT Chief for the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he led the technology aspects of the bioterrorism program’s response to 9/11, anthrax in 2001, SARS, and other outbreaks. 


This will be the fourth Suits and Spooks event since I first started holding them in September of 2011 and it may be the most critical one yet. The information that will be shared on October 18th by our speakers (a complete list is available at the website) will clearly lay out offensive options that could wreak havoc on up to six key components of critical infrastructure - water, power, transportation, communication, health care, and banking. Due to the timeliness and the importance of this topic, we're going to cap attendance at 130 instead of 100. If you'd like to be part of this history-making event, registration begins today.

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