On May 25, 2017, Representative Tom Graves released the second draft of proposed amendments to 18 U.S.C. 1030 (known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). Representative Graves’ bill is known as the Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act (or ACDC Act). There is no universally accepted umbrella term for this, but it is variously called “Active Defense”, “Active Cyber Defense”, “hacking back,” “hackback”, and “strike back.” You will find the word “active” applied almost universally in these discussions, though it frequently results in establishing a simple (though false) dichotomy of “passive defense” vs. “active defense” and frequently leading to fallacious “straw man” arguments. I prefer the term “Active Response Continuum” to explicitly avoid setting up such binary choices. [Dittrich and Himma(2005)]

On July 31, 2013, Jason Geffner of CrowdStrike discussed a new tool called “Tortilla” that allows incident responders and computer security researchers to hide behind the Tor network as they poke and prod malicious software infrastructure. Were I there, I would have asked Jason this question: What things should I not do while using Tortilla, and why shouldn’t I do them? I know Jason and respect his technical skills, but if he and CrowdStrike don’t have a good answer, that will say a lot about our field’s collective ability to reason about actions along the Active Response Continuum. [D. Dittrich and K. E. Himma. Active Response to Computer Intrusions. Chapter 182 in Vol. III, Handbook of Information Security, 2005. http://ssrn.com/abstract=790585.]

[This post expresses the personal opinion of the author and is not an official statement representing the Honeynet Project.]

At the AusCERT 2013 conference, Dmitri Alperovich called for debate about, “the kinds of actions that infosec professionals are allowed to take against attackers.” I agree with Dmitri, and in fact I made the same call, at the same conference on May 23, 2005! (AusCERT invited me to speak on an emerging topic and I chose to speak for the first time publicly at AusCERT 2005 about the Active Response Continuum research I had been doing with funding from Cisco.) As one of the world’s foremost experts on this topic, with over two decades of security operations experience, I welcome Dmitri to the debate. :)

This is a response to a CSO Online blog post by Jeff Bardin ("Caution: Not Executing Offensive Actions Against Our Adversaries is High Risk," November 2012.), which is a rebuttal to a blog post by Jody Westby on Forbes online (“Caution: Active Response to Cyber Attacks Has High Risk.”) Mr. Bardin is obviously playing on words in the title and I seriously doubt he believes that it is higher risk to not take aggressive actions than is to do so. His post does not contain a reasoned proposal for how to change or work within existing legal and ethical norms to allow aggressive actions directed at computer network attackers. It is instead a strident endorsement of a vaguely defined “new approach” of counter-attack using simplistic arguments based on emotion and a desire for retribution (an unethical position to take), lacking sufficient discussion of appropriate “rules of engagement,” principle-based ethical justifications of any type beyond basic “right of self-defense” arguments, and including no oversight mechanisms to minimize the potential for abuse or collateral damage. This response is quite long, including not only Mr. Bardin’s own words for context but also many references to materials apropos to the topic that Mr. Bardin does not provide in his post.