Jerry Petersen
Andrew Hallman, vice president of national security strategy and integration at Peraton, believes the U.S. should acknowledge the reality that it will be attacked in cyberspace, where it lacks a stable deterrence against such actions by adversaries, The Washington Times reported Monday.
The Need for Cyber Resiliency
Hallman, formerly deputy director for digital innovation at the CIA and a past Wash100 awardee, said during The Washington Times’ Threat Status podcast that the current situation, as illustrated by a hack against the computer systems of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in February, demands cyber resiliency on the part of the government as well as the private sector.
Defending Forward
And while the Peraton VP considers the digital battlespace a “gray zone of warfare,” he nevertheless believes staying exclusively on the defensive is insufficient and that the U.S. should instead be “defending forward,” a cyber posture that combines both defense and offense.
A component of defending forward are hunt forward operations, which are carried out by the U.S. Cyber Command where U.S. personnel help partner countries, at their behest, observe and detect hackers on their networks. As of April, 22 such deployments have already taken place.
Adversaries have criticized such actions, but Hallman supports them, saying, “I do believe we’re on the right on this.”
“I firmly believe that they [U.S. adversaries] have compelled us to be combatants on this digital battlefield, and so we should be the best at what we can be,” Hallman added.
