Tag: Cyber Operations

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Vibe-Coded Malware Isn’t a Game Changer (Yet)

Over the past week there’s been heightened concern about how LLMs can be used to facilitate cyber operations. Much of that concern is tightly linked to recent reports from Anthropic, which are facing growing criticism from the security community.

Anthropic claimed that a threat actor launched an AI-assisted operation which was up to 90% autonomous. But the LLM largely relied on pre-existing open source tools that operators already chain together, and the success rates appear low. Moreover, hallucinations meant that adversaries were often told that the LLM had done something, or had access to credentials, when it did not.

We should anticipate that LLMs will enable some adversaries to chain together code that could exploit vulnerabilities. But vibe‑coding an exploit chain is not the same as building something that can reliably compromise real systems. To date, experiments with vibe‑coded malware and autonomous agents suggest that generated outputs typically require skilled operators to debug, adapt, and operationalise them. Even then, the outputs of LLM‑assisted malware often fail outright when confronted with real‑world constraints and defences.

That’s partly because exploit development is a different skill set and capability than building “functional‑enough” software. Vibe coding for productivity apps might tolerate flaky edge cases and messy internals. Exploit chains, by contrast, often fail to exploit vulnerabilities unless they are properly tailored to a given target.

An AI system that can assemble a roughly working application from a series of prompts does not automatically inherit the ability to produce highly reliable, end‑to‑end exploit chains. Some capability will transfer, but we should be wary of assuming a neat, 100% carry‑over from vibe‑coded software to effective vibe‑coded malware.

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Japan’s New Active Cyberdefence Law

Japan has passed legislation that will significantly reshape the range of cyber operations that its government agencies can undertake. As reported by The Record, the law will enable the following.

  1. Japan’s Self-Defence Forces will be able to provide material support to allies under the justification that failing to do so could endanger the whole of the country.
  2. Japanese LEAs can infiltrate and neutralize hostile servers before any malicious activity has taken place and to do so below the level of an armed attack against Japan.
  3. The Self-Defence Forces be authorized to undertake offensive cyber operations against particularly sophisticated incidents.
  4. The government will be empowered to analyze foreign internet traffic entering the country or just transiting through it. (The government has claimed it won’t collect or analyze the contents of this traffic.) Of note: the new law will not authorize the government to collect or analyze domestically generated internet traffic.
  5. Japan will establish an independent oversight panel that will give prior authorization to all acts of data collection and analysis, as well as for offensive operations intended to target attackers’ servers. This has some relationship to Ministerial oversight of the CSE in Canada, though perhaps (?) with a greater degree of control over the activities understand by Japanese agencies.

The broader result of this legislative update will be to further align the Japanese government, and its agencies, with its Five Eyes friends and allies.

It will be interesting to learn over time whether these activities are impaired by the historical stovepiping of Japan’s defence and SIGINT competencies. Historically the strong division between these organizations impeded cyber operations and was an issue that the USA (and NSA in particular) had sought to have remedied over a decade ago. If these issues persist then the new law may not be taken up as effectively as would otherwise be possible.

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American Telecommunication Companies’ Cybersecurity Deficiencies Increasingly Apparent

Five Eyes countries have regularly and routinely sought, and gained, access to foreign telecommunications infrastructures to carry out their operations. The same is true of other well resourced countries, including China.

Salt Typhoon’s penetration of American telecommunications and email platforms is slowly coming into relief. The New York Times has an article that summarizes what is being publicly disclosed at this point in time:

  • The full list of phone numbers that the Department of Justice had under surveillance in lawful interception systems has been exposed, with the effect of likely undermining American counter-intelligence operations aimed at Chinese operatives
  • Phone calls, unencrypted SMS messages, and email providers have been compromised
  • The FBI has heightened concerns that informants may have been exposed
  • Apple’s services, as well as end to end encrypted systems, were not penetrated

American telecommunications networks were penetrated, in part, due to companies relying on decades old systems and equipment that do not meet modern security requirements. Fixing these deficiencies may require rip-and-replacing some old parts of the network with the effect of creating “painful network outages for consumers.” Some of the targeting of American telecommunications networks is driven by an understanding that American national security defenders have some restrictions on how they can operate on American-based systems.

The weaknesses of telecommunications networks and their associated systems are generally well known. And mobile systems are particularly vulnerable to exploitation as a result of archaic standards and an unwillingness by some carriers to activate the security-centric aspects of 4G and 5G standards.

Some of the Five Eyes, led by Canada, have been developing and deploying defensive sensor networks that are meant to shore up some defences of government and select non-government organizations.1 But these edge, network, and cloud based sensors can only do so much: telecommunications providers, themselves, need to prioritize ensuring their core networks are protected against the classes of adversaries trying to penetrate them.2

At the same time, it is worth recognizing that end to end communications continued to be protected even in the face of Salt Typhoon’s actions. This speaks the urgent need to ensure that these forms of communications security continue to be available to all users. We often read that law enforcement needs select access to such communications and that they can be trusted to not abuse such exceptional access.

Setting aside the vast range of legal, normative, or geopolitical implications of weakening end to end encryption, cyber operations like the one perpetrated by Salt Typhoon speak to governments’ collective inabilities to protect their lawful access systems. There’s no reason to believe they’d be any more able to protect exceptional access measures that weakened, or otherwise gained access to, select content of end to end encrypted communications.

  1. I have discussed these sensors elsewhere, including in “Unpacking NSICOP’s Special Report on the Government of Canada’s Framework and Activities to Defend its Systems and Networks from Cyber Attack”. Historical information about these sensors, which were previously referred to under the covernames of CASCADE, EONBLUE, and PHOTONICPRISM, is available at the SIGINT summaries. ↩︎
  2. We are seeing some governments introducing, and sometimes passing, laws that would foster more robust security requirements. In Canada, Bill C-26 is generally meant to do this though the legislation as introduced raised some serious concerns. ↩︎
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New Russian APT Daisy-Chain Capability Revealed

In an impressive operation, a Russian APT reportedly targeted a Washington, DC network after daisy chaining through a sequence of neighbouring networks and devices in 2022. The trick: they may have done so without ever using any local operatives.

This is a movie-like kind of operation and speaks to the immense challenges in defending against very well resourced, motivated, and entrepreneurial adversaries.

Wired has a good and accessible article on the cyber activity. The full report is available at Volexity’s website; it’s well worth the read, if only to appreciate the tradecraft of the adversaries as well as Veloxity’s own acumen.

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Sophos Risks Legitimizing Hack Back Activities

Each week is seemingly accompanied by news of some perimeter security appliance being successfully exploited by adversaries. Sophos has produced a report — covered by Wired — which outlines their 5-year efforts to identify and combat such adversaries. It’s a wild read both in terms of the range of activities undertaken by Sophos and for making clearer to the public the range of intelligence activities that private organizations undertake as part of their cybersecurity operations.

Some of the major revelations, and activities undertaken, by Sophos include:

  • A broader group of China-based researchers developed hacking techniques and supplied them to Chinese government APTs.
  • Historically the exploitation of Sophos appliances was being carried out using 0-days but, in recent assessments, APTs are using N-days to target end-of-life equipment.
  • Sophos included code in one of its hotfixes to obtain additional information from consumer devices and expose more information about adversaries to the company.
  • Sophos went to far as to deploy, “its own spy implants to the Sophos devices in Chengdu they were testing on—essentially hacking the hackers, albeit only through code added to a few installations of its own products the hackers had obtained.”
  • Targets of Chinese APTs were often located throughout Asia, and most recently included “another country’s nuclear energy regulatory agency, then a military facility in the same country and the airport of the country’s capital city, as well as other hacking incidents that targeted Tibetan exiles.”
  • Sophos found that the adversaries had built a bootkit which is designed to infect low-level code. The company is asserting this may be the first time a firewall bootkit has ever been seen. They have no intelligence that it has ever been deployed in the wild.

It’s uncommon for the details of how private companies have developed their defensive strategies over a longer period of time to be made public, and so this is helpful for broadening the space for discussion. Sophos’ activities are, also, significant on the basis that the private company implanted its own systems to develop intelligence concerning its Chinese adversaries.

There has been extensive normative and legal discussion on the risks linked with “hacking back” and Sophos’ actions are another step towards normalizing such behaviour, albeit under the auspice of a company targeting its own equipment. I personally don’t think that Sophos’ defence that they were targeting their own equipment meaningfully isolates the broader implications of their actions. Perimeter appliances are extensively deployed and their decision may both normalize such behaviours broadly by private firms for their own ends and, also, further open the doors to some governments pressuring private firms to deploy implants on behalf of said governments. Neither of these trajectories are likely to end well.

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The Ongoing Problems of Placing Backdoors in Telecommunications Networks

In a cyber incident reminiscent of Operation Aurora,1 threat actors successfully penetrated American telecommunications companies (and a small number of other countries’ service providers) to gain access to lawful interception systems or associated data. The result was that:

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

…

The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.

Not only is this a major intelligence coup for the adversary in question, but it once more reveals the fundamental difficulties in deliberately establishing lawful access/interception systems in communications infrastructures to support law enforcement and national security investigations while, simultaneously, preventing adversaries from taking advantage of the same deliberately-designed communications vulnerabilities.

  1. Or Greece’s 2004 Olympics wiretap scandal. ↩︎
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What is the Role of Cyber Operators in Assessing Effectiveness or Shaping Cyber Policy?

An anonymous European Intelligence Official wrote an oped in July entitled, “Can lawyers lose wars by stifling cyber capabilities?” The article does a good job in laying out why a cyber operator — that is, someone who is presumably relatively close to either planning or undertaking cyber operations — is deeply frustrated by the way in which decision-making is undertaken.

While I admit to having some sympathy for the author’s plight I fundamentally disagree with much of their argument, and think that the positions they hold should be taken up and scrutinised. In this post, I’m really just pulling out quotations from the article and then providing some rebuttal or analysis — you’re best off reading it, first, if you want to more fully follow along and assess whether I’m being fair to the author and the points they are making.

With that out of the way, here we go….

Law is no longer seen as a system of checks and balances but as a way to shape state behaviour in cyberspace

Yes, this is one of the things that laws are actually supposed to do. You may (reasonably in some cases) disagree with the nature of the laws and their effects, but law isn’t a mere “check and balance.” And, especially where there is no real ability to contest interpretations of law (because they are administered by government agencies largely behind closed doors) it is particularly important for law to have a stronger guiding function in order to maintain democratic legitimacy and social trust in government operations.

Idealistic legalism causes legal debates on cyber capabilities to miss a crucial discussion point: what operational constraints are we willing to accept and what consequences does that have for our national security?

Sure, but some of this is because the USA government is so closed mouthed about its capacities. Consider if there was a more robust effort to explain practice such as in the case of some European agencies? I would note that the Dutch, as an example, are sometimes pretty explicit about their operations which is then helpful for considering their activities with respect to authorising laws and associated national and international norms.

Laws attempt to capture as many activities in cyberspace as possible. To do so, legal frameworks must oversimplify. This is ill-suited to such a complex domain

This seems to not appreciate how law tends, at least in some jurisdictions, to be broader in scope and then supplemented by regulations or policies. However, where regulations or policies have been determined as regularly insufficient there may be a decision that more detailed laws are now necessary. To an extent, this is the case post-Snowden and with very good reason, and as demonstrated in the various non-compliance reports that has been found with certain NSA (and other American intelligence community) operations over time.

The influence of practitioners slowly diminishes as lawyers increasingly take the lead in shaping senior leadership opinions on proposed cyber operations rather than merely advising.

I can appreciate the frustration of seeing the leadership move from operations practitioners to policy/legal practitioners.1 But that shift between whether organisations are being led by operations practitioners or those focused in law/policy can be a normal back and forth.

And to be entirely honest the key thing — and the implicit critique throughout this whole piece — is that the decision makers understand what the ops folks are saying.2 Those in decision making roles have a lot of responsibilities and, often, a bigger or different picture of the implications of operations.

I’m in no way saying that lawyers should be the folks to always call the shots3 but just because you’re in operations doesn’t mean that you necessarily are making the right calls broadly and, instead, may be seeing the right calls through your particular lens and mission. That lens and mission may not always be sufficient in coming to a conclusion that aligns more broadly with agency or national or international policy intents/goals.

… a law might stipulate that a (foreign) intelligence agency cannot collect information from systems owned by the citizens of its country. But what if, as Chinese and Russian cyber threat actors do, a system belonging to a citizen is being abused to route attack traffic through? Such an operational development is not foreseen, and thus not prescribed, by law. To collect information would then be illegal and require judicial overhaul – a process that can take years in a domain that can see modus operandi shift in a matter of days.

There may be cases where you have particularly risk adverse decision makers or, alternately, particularly strong legal limitations that preclude certain kinds of operations.

I would note that it is against the law to simply target civilians in conflict scenarios on grounds that doing so runs counter to the agreed-upon laws of war (recognising they are often not adhered to). Does this have the effect of impeding certain kinds of military activities? Yes. And that may still be the right decisions notwithstanding the consequences it may have on the ability to conduct some operations and/or reduce their efficacy.

In the cyber context, the complaint is that certain activities are precluded on the basis that the law doesn’t explicitly recognise and authorise them. Law routinely leaves wiggle rooms and part of the popular (and sometimes private…) problem has been how intelligence lawyers are perceived of as abusing that wiggle room — again, see the NSA and other agencies as they were denuded in some of the Snowden revelations, and openly opposite interpretations of legislation that was adopted to authorise actions that legislators had deliberately sought to preclude.4 For further reasons the mistrust may exist between operators and legislators, in Canada you can turn to the ongoing historical issues between CSIS and the Federal Court which suggests that the “secret law and practices” adopted by Canada’s IC community may counter to the actual law and legal processes, and then combine that with some NSIRA findings that CSE activities may have taken place in contravention of Canadian privacy law.

In the above context, I would say that lots of legislators (and publics) have good ground to doubt the good will or decision-making capacity of the various parties within national ICs. You don’t get to undertake the kind of activities that happened, previously, and then just pretend that “it was all in the recent past, everything’s changed, trust us guys.”

I would also note: the quoted material makes an assumption that policy makers have not, in fact, considered the scenario the author is proposing and then rejected it as a legitimate way of operating. The fact that a decision may not have gone your way is not the same as your concerns not being evaluated in the process of reaching a conclusion.

When effectiveness is seen as secondary, cyber activities may be compliant, but they are not winning the fight.

As I have been writing in various (frustrating) peer reviews I’ve been doing: evidence of this, please, as opposed to opinion and supposition. Also, “the fight” will be understood and perceived by different people in different positions in different agencies: a universal definition should not be presumed.

…constraints also incur costs due to increased bureaucratic complexity. This hampers operational flexibility and innovation – a trade-off often not adequately weighed by, or even visible to, law- and decision-makers. When appointing ex-ante oversight boards or judicial approval, preparation time for conducting cyber operations inevitably increases, even for those perfectly legal from the beginning.

So, in this case the stated problem is that legislators and decision makers aren’t getting the discrete kinds of operational detail that this particular writer thinks are needed to make the “right” trade off decisions.

In some cases….yeah. That’ll be the case. Welcome to the hell of people not briefing up properly, or people not understanding because briefing materials weren’t scoped or prepared right, and so forth. That is: welcome to the government (or any sufficiently large bureaucracy)!

But more broadly, the complaint is that the operator in question knows better than the other parties but without, again, specific and clear evidence that the trade offs are incorrect. I get that spooky things can’t be spoken aloud without them becoming de-spookified, but picture a similar kind of argument in any other sector of government and you’ll get the same kind of complaint. Ops people will regularly complain about legislators or decision makers when they don’t get their way, their sandcastles get crushed, or they have to do things in less-efficient ways in their busy days. And sometimes they’re right to complain and, in others, there is a lot more at stake than what they see operationally going on.

This is a losing game because, as Calder Walton noted, ‘Chinese and Russian services are limited only by operational effectiveness’.

I don’t want to suggest I disagree! But, at the same time, this is along the lines of “autocracies are great because they move faster than democracies and we have to recognise their efficiency” arguments that float around periodically.5

All of which is to say: autocracies and dictatorships have different internal logics to their bureaucracies that can have corresponding effects on their operations.

While it may be “the law” that impedes some Five Eyes/Western agencies’ activities, you can picture the need to advance the interests of kleptocrats or dictators’ kids, gin up enough ransomware dollars to put food on the team’s table, and so forth, as establishing some limits on the operational effectiveness of autocratic governments’ intelligence agencies.

It’s also worth noting that “effectiveness” can be a contested concept. If you’re OK blundering around and burning your tools and are identified pretty often then you may have a different approach to cyber operations, generally, as opposed to situations where being invisible is a key part of operational development. I’m not trying to suggest that the Russians, Chinese, and other adversaries just blunder about, nor that the FVEY are magical ghosts that no one sees on boxes and undertaking operations. However, how you perceive or define “effective” will have corresponding consequences for the nature and types of operations you undertake and which are perceived as achieving the mission’s goals.

Are agencies going to publicly admit they were unable to collect intelligence on certain adversary cyber actors because of legal boundaries?

This speaks to the “everything is secret and thus trust us” that is generally antithetical to democratic governance. To reverse things on the author: should there be more revelation of operations that don’t work so that they can more broadly be learned from? The complaint seems to be that the lawyers et al don’t know what they’re doing because they aren’t necessarily exposed to the important spooky stuff, or understand its significance and importance. To what extent, then, do the curtains need to open some and communicate this in effective ways and, also, the ways in which successes have previously happened.

I know: if anything is shown then it blows the whole premise of secret operations. But it’s hard to complain that people don’t get the issues if no facts are brought to the table, whereas the lawyers and such can point to the laws and at least talk to them. If you can’t talk about ops, then don’t be surprised that people will talk about what is publicly discussable…and your ops arguments won’t have weight because they don’t even really exist in the room where the substantive discussions about guardrails may be taking place.

In summary: while I tend to not agree with the author — and disagree as someone who has always been more on the policy and/or law side of the analytic space — their article was at least thought provoking. And for that alone I think that it’s worth taking the time to read their article and consider the arguments within it.

  1. I would, however, would hasten to note that the head of NSA/Cyber Command tends to be a hella lot closer to “ops” by merit of a military leadership. ↩︎
  2. And, also, what the legal and policy teams are saying… ↩︎
  3. Believe me on this point… ↩︎
  4. See, as example: “In 2006, after Congress added the requirement that Section 215 orders be “relevant to” an investigation, the DOJ acknowledged that language was intended to impose new protections. A fact sheet about the new law published by the DOJ stated: “The reauthorizing legislation’s amendments provide significant additional safeguards of Americans’ civil liberties and privacy,” in part by clarifying, “that a section 215 order cannot be issued unless the information sought is relevant to an authorized national security investigation.” Yet just months later, the DOJ convinced the FISC that “relevant to” meant “all” in the first Section 215 bulk dragnet order. In other words, the language inserted by Congress to ​limit ​the scope of what information could be gathered was used by the government to say that there were ​no limits​.” From: Section 215: A Brief History of Violations. ↩︎
  5. See, as examples, the past 2-4 years ago when there was a perception that the Chinese response to Covid-19 and the economy was superior to everyone else that was grappling with the global pandemic. ↩︎
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Cyber Attacks Versus Operations in Ukraine

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For the past decade there has been a steady drumbeat that ‘cyberwar is coming’. Sometimes the parties holding these positions are in militaries and, in other cases, from think tanks or university departments that are trying to link kinetic-adjacent computer operations with ‘war’.

Perhaps the most famous rebuttal to the cyberwar proponents has been Thomas Rid’s Cyber War Will Not Take Place. The title was meant to be provocative and almost has the effect of concealing a core insight of Rid’s argument: cyber operations will continue to be associated with conflicts but cyber operations are unlikely to constitute (or lead to) out-and-out war on their own. Why? Because it is very challenging to prepare and launch cyber operations that have significant kinetic results at the scale we associate with full-on war.

Since the Russian Federation’s war of aggression towards Ukraine there have regularly been shocked assertions that cyberware isn’t taking place. A series of pieces by The Economist, as an example, sought to prepare readers for a cyberwar that just hasn’t happened. Why not? Because The Economist–much like other outlets!–often presumed that the cyber dimensions of the conflict in Ukraine would bear at least some resemblance to the long-maligned concept of a ‘cyber Pearl Harbour’: a critical cyber-enable strike of some sort would have a serious, and potentially devastating, effect on how Ukraine could defend against Russian aggression and thus tilt the balance towards Russian military victory.

As a result of the early mistaken understandings of cyber operations, scholars and experts have once more come out and explained why cyber operations are not the same as an imagined cyber Pearl Harbour situation, while still taking place in the Ukrainian conflict. Simultaneously, security and malware researchers have taken the opportunity to belittle International Relations theorists who have written about cyberwar and argued that these theorists have fundamentally misunderstood how cyber operations take place.

Part of the challenge is ‘cyberwar’ has often been popularly seen as the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their associated military hardware being deployed into a foreign country. As noted by Rid in a recent op-ed, while some cyber operations are meant to be apparent others are much more subtle. The former might be meant to reduce the will to fight or diminish command and control capabilities. The latter, in contrast, will look a lot like other reconnaissance operations: knowing who is commanding which battle group, the logistical challenges facing the opponent, or state of infrastructure in-country. All these latter dimensions provide strategic and tactical advantages to the party who’s launched the surveillance operation. Operations meant to degrade capabilities may occur but will often be more subtle. This subtly can be a particularly severe risk in a conflict, such as if your ammunition convoy is sent to the wrong place or train timetables are thrown off with the effect of stymying civilian evacuation or resupply operations.1

What’s often seemingly lost in the ‘cyberwar’ debates–which tend to take place either between people who don’t understand cyber operations, those who stand to profit from misrepresentations of them, or those who are so theoretical in their approaches as to be ignorant of reality–is that contemporary wars entail blended forces. Different elements of those blends have unique and specific tactical and strategic purposes. Cyber isn’t going to have the same effect as a Grad Missile Launcher or a T-90 Battle Tank, but that missile launcher or tank isn’t going to know that the target it’s pointed towards is strategically valuable without reconnaissance nor is it able to impair logistics flows the same way as a cyber operation targeting train schedules. To expect otherwise is to grossly misunderstand how cyber operations function in a conflict environment.

I’d like to imagine that one result of the Russian war of aggression will be to improve the general population’s understanding of cyber operations and what they entail, and do not entail. It’s possible that this might happen given that major news outlets, such as the AP and Reuters, are changing how they refer to such activities: they will not be called ‘cyberattacks’ outside very nuanced situations now. In simply changing what we call cyber activities–as operations as opposed to attacks–we’ll hopefully see a deflating of the language and, with it, more careful understandings of how cyber operations take place in and out of conflict situations. As such, there’s a chance (hope?) we might see a better appreciation of the significance of cyber operations in the population writ-large in the coming years. This will be increasingly important given the sheer volume of successful (non-conflict) operations that take place each day.

  1. It’s worth recognizing that part of why we aren’t reading about successful Russian operations is, first, due to Ukrainian and allies’ efforts to suppress such successes for fear of reducing Ukrainian/allied morale. Second, however, is that Western signals intelligence agencies such as the NSA, CSE, and GCHQ, are all very active in providing remote defensive and other operational services to Ukrainian forces. There was also a significant effort ahead of the conflict to shore up Ukrainian defences and continues to be a strong effort by Western companies to enhance the security of systems used by Ukrainians. Combined, this means that Ukraine is enjoying additional ‘forces’ while, simultaneously, generally keeping quiet about its own failures to protect its systems or infrastructure. ↩︎
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The Risks Linked With Canadian Cyber Operations in Ukraine

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Late last month, Global News published a story on how the Canadian government is involved in providing cyber support to the Ukrainian government in the face of Russia’s illegal invasion. While the Canadian military declined to confirm or deny any activities they might be involved in, the same was not true of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). The CSE is Canada’s foreign signals intelligence agency. In addition to collecting intelligence, it is also mandated to defend Canadian federal systems and those designated as of importance to the government of Canada, provide assistance to other federal agencies, and conduct active and defensive cyber operations.1

From the Global News article it is apparent that the CSE is involved in both foreign intelligence operations as well as undertaking cyber defensive activities. Frankly these kinds of activity are generally, and persistently, undertaken with regard to the Russian government and so it’s not a surprise that these activities continue apace.

The CSE spokesperson also noted that the government agency is involved in ‘cyber operations’ though declined to explain whether these are defensive cyber operations or active cyber operations. In the case of the former, the Minister of National Defense must consult with the Minister of Foreign Affairs before authorizing an operation, whereas in the latter both Ministers must consent to an operation prior to it taking place. Defensive and active operations can assume the same form–roughly the same activities or operations might be undertaken–but the rationale for the activity being taken may vary based on whether it is cast as defensive or active (i.e., offensive).2

These kinds of cyber operations are the ones that most worry scholars and practitioners, on the basis that there is a risk that foreign operators or adversaries may misread a signal from a cyber operation or because the operation might have unintended consequences. Thus, the risk is that the operations that the CSE is undertaking run the risk of accidentally (or intentionally, I guess) escalating affairs between Canada and the Russian Federation in the midst of the shooting war between Russian and Ukrainian forces.

While there is, of course, a need for some operational discretion on the part of the Canadian government it is also imperative that the Canadian public be sufficiently aware of the government’s activities to understand the risks (or lack thereof) which are linked to the activities that Canadian agencies are undertaking. To date, the Canadian government has not released its cyber foreign policy doctrine nor has the Canadian Armed Forces released its cyber doctrine.3 The result is that neither Canadians nor Canada’s allies or adversaries know precisely what Canada will do in the cyber domain, how Canada will react when confronted, or the precise nature of Canada’s escalatory ladder. The government’s secrecy runs the risk of putting Canadians in greater jeopardy of a response from the Russian Federation (or other adversaries) without the Canadian public really understanding what strategic or tactical activities might be undertaken on their behalf.

Canadians have a right to know at least enough about what their government is doing to be able to begin assessing the risks linked with conducting operations during an active militant conflict against an adversary with nuclear weapons. Thus far such information has not been provided. The result is that Canadians are ill-prepared to assess the risk that they may be quietly and quickly drawn into the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Such secrecy bodes poorly for being able to hold government to account, to say nothing of preventing Canadians from appreciating the risk that they could become deeply drawn into a very hot conflict scenario.

  1. For more on the CSE and the laws governing its activities, see “A Deep Dive into Canada’s Overhaul of Its Foreign Intelligence and Cybersecurity Laws.” ↩︎
  2. For more on this, see “Analysis of the Communications Security Establishment Act and Related Provisions in Bill C-59 (An Act respecting national security matters), First Reading (December 18, 2017)“, pp 27-32. ↩︎
  3. Not for lack of trying to access them, however, as in both cases I have filed access to information requests to the government for these documents 1 years ago, with delays expected to mean I won’t get the documents before the end of 2022 at best. ↩︎
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To What Extent is China’s Control of Information a Cyber Weakness?

Lawfare has a good piece on How China’s control of information is a cyber weakness:

“Policymakers need to be aware that successful competition in cyberspace depends on having intrinsic knowledge of the consequences a democratic or authoritarian mode of government has for a country’s cyber defense. Western leaders have for a long time prioritized security of physical infrastructure. This might translate into better cyber defense capabilities, but it leaves those governments open to information operations. At the same time, more authoritarian-leaning countries may have comparative advantages when it comes to defending against information operations but at the cost of perhaps being more vulnerable to cyber network attack and exploitation. Authoritarian governments may tolerate this compromise on security due to their prioritization of surveillance and censorship practices.

I have faith that professionals in the intelligence community have previously assessed this divide between what democracies have developed defences against versus what countries like China have prepared against. Nonetheless this is a helpful summary of the two sides of the coin.

I’m less certain of a subsequent argument made in the same piece:

These diverging emphases on different aspects of cybersecurity by democratic and authoritarian governments are not new. However, Western governments have put too much emphasis on the vulnerability of democracies to information operations, and not enough attention has been dedicated to the vulnerability of authoritarian regimes in their cyber defenses. It is crucial for democratic governments to assess the impact of information controls and regime security considerations in authoritarian-leaning countries for their day-to-day cyber operations.”

I really don’t think that intelligence community members in the West are ignorant of the vulnerabilities that may be present in China or other authoritarian jurisdictions. While the stories in Western media emphasize how effective foreign operators are extracting data from Western companies and organizations, intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes are also deeply invested in penetrating strategically and tactically valuable digital resources abroad. One of the top-line critiques against the Five Eyes is that they have invested heavily on offence over defence, and the article from Lawfare doesn’t really ever take that up. Instead, and inaccurately to my mind, it suggests that cyber defence is something done with a truly serious degree of resourcing in the Five Eyes. I have yet to find someone in the intelligence community that would seriously assert a similar proposition.

One thing that isn’t assessed in the article, and which would have been interesting to see considered, is the extent(s) to which the relative dearth of encryption in China better enables their defenders to identify and terminate exfiltration of data from their networks. Does broader visibility into data networks enhance Chinese defenders’ operations? I have some doubts, but it would be curious to see the arguments for and against that position.