PerspectiveHacking Back May Be Less Risky than We Thought

The United States has historically been wary of punching back in cyberspace, fearing that a digital conflict could rapidly escalate to rockets and bombs. But those concerns may be overblown.

Joseph Marks writes in the Washington Post that a pair of recent studies has found it’s extremely rare for nations to ratchet up a cyber conflict, let alone escalate it to a conventional military exchange, and that the U.S. public may put extra pressure on leaders not to let a cyber conflict get out of hand.

“The emerging consensus among researchers is that cyberattacks aren’t unusually escalatory. If anything, the opposite is true,” writes Jacquelyn Schneider, a researcher at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who was a co-author on one of the studies and detailed both of them in a Postanalysis. The other study came from the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

“The findings could be a boon for the Trump administration, which has announced a muscular new hacking back strategy in an effort to cow digital adversaries, such as Russia and China,” Marks writes. “That has included digital strikes against Russia to prevent election interference and against an Iranian computer system used to plan attacks on oil tankers. The administration is reportedly considering another round of digital retaliation to punish Iran for a drone strike against Saudi oil facilities.”

But there’s also some bad news for the Trump team: The Cato study didn’t find much evidence that hacking back does anything to make adversaries stop hacking you in the first place, which could undermine the administration’s main goal for the program. 

“Attacks do not beget attacks, nor do they deter them,” the authors Brandon Valeriano and Benjamin Jensen wrote.