Our picksAnti-China Tech Alliance | Ransomware’s New Target | Microgrids & Wildfires, and more

The Great Anti-China Tech Alliance (Andrew Grotto and Martin Schallbruch, Foreign Policy)
The United States and Europe will regret letting Beijing win the race to govern digital technology.

Cyber War as an Intelligence Contest (Joshua Rovner, War on the Rocks)
After being the target of several cyber operations over the last decade, the United States is in a mood to fight back. But there is little agreement about what to do, and how far to go. The Department of Defense has pledged to “defend forward” in cyberspace, and U.S. Cyber Command is committed to “persistent engagement” against U.S. adversaries. Critics, however, warn that these steps create new risks in a domain already fraught with uncertainty. The debate is also playing out in Congress, where the Cyberspace Solarium Commission is currently weighing different options.
The debaters on all sides draw their logic from strategic theory, the family of ideas about how states use force and coercive threats to achieve their national interests. Advocates of a more aggressive approach refer to ideas about agreed competition below the line of armed conflict. Channeling Thomas Schelling, they argue that competition in cyberspace is necessary to establish boundary lines of acceptable conflict in a domain that has been witness to all manner of mischief. More cautious analysts lean on a different set of strategic theories, which focus on crisis instability and the potential for escalation. According to this argument, the nature of cyberspace invites a particularly intense security dilemma. The things that states do in the name of cyber defense look like preparations for attack. In a crisis such activities could quickly spiral into war.

Ransomware Has a New Target (Renee Dudley, Defense One)
A successful attack on an IT services provider can lock up the data of dozens of government and private clients at once.