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Hacking Back Unpacked: an Eye for an Eye? Not So Fast

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Hacking Back Unpacked: an Eye for an Eye? Not So Fast ARI 3/2020 14 January 2021 Hacking Back unpacked: an eye for an eye? Not so fast Stefan Soesanto | Senior Researcher, Cyber Defense Team, ETH Zurich | @iiyonite Theme It had to happen eventually. Out of all the countries in the world, the hacking back debate has finally entered the political discourse in neutral Switzerland. While it is still too early to determine where the discussion will be heading toward, it is also the perfect time to insert a new perspective on hacking back. Summary This analysis will try to build a new baseline by explaining the fragmented history of hacking back and outlining varying degrees of operational intensity to refine a more nuanced understanding of hacking back.1 Having said that, given the small number of publicly known cases, writing about hacking back is similar to putting together a 1000- piece puzzle with a mere 20 pieces while having only a rough idea as to what the complete picture actually looks like. Analysis The Swiss discourse on hacking back was kicked off by Sanija Ameti, a PhD researcher at the institute for public law at the University of Bern, with an op-ed in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) on July 17, 2020.2 Ameti’s core argument is that a solely defensive stance, that requires companies to invest large chunks of their profits to continuously up their cybersecurity posture, is both unrealistic in the long run and insufficient in the short term, particularly when it comes to defending again nation state actors. Her solution: private companies ought to be allowed to build-up their own active cyber defence capabilities, or outsource hacking back operations to specialized companies, whose activities could be overseen by the Swiss defence department. Two weeks later, the NZZ published a counter-op-ed by IT entrepreneur Fabian Reinhard.3 Reinhard argued that companies have already adapted to the evolving cyber threat landscape by implementing defence in-depth strategies. Additionally, he notes that allowing companies to build-up and acquire offensive capabilities would be synonymous to militarizing cyberspace and kicking-off an arms race. Reinhard’s solution: Focus on 1 For an analysis on the ethical and legal questions surrounding hacking back see: Patrick Lin, ‘Ethics of Hacking Back,’ California Polytechnic State University, September 26, 2016. Scott J. Shackelford et al., ‘Rethinking Active Defense: A Comparative Analysis of Proactive Cybersecurity Policymaking,’ University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, 2019. 2 Sanija Ameti, ‘Cyberangriff – die bessere Verteidigung?‘ NZZ, July 17, 2020. 3 Fabian Reinhard, ‚Der digitale Gegenangriff ist keine brauchbare Strategie für die Cyber-Verteidigung,‘ NZZ, August 1, 2020. 1 Hacking Back unpacked: an eye for an eye? Not so fast ARI 3/2020 - 14/1/2021 - Elcano Royal Institute international cooperation to hunt down cybercriminals and maybe even create an international cybersecurity alliance to enhance the private sector’s defensive posture. On November 5, 2020, broadcasting company SRF reinvigorated the discussion by interviewing two members of the Swiss Federal Assembly.4 Jörg Mäder – who is also a freelance programmer – did not like Sanija’s idea and explained that cyberspace should not degenerate into vigilante justice. As a solution he emphasized that the government and private sector should act as a team and play to their strengths within a clearly regulated framework. Meanwhile, Assembly member Franz Grüter – who is also the chairman of an IT company – voiced some understanding for Sanija’s position by noting that the very idea of hacking back arises due to a certain discomfort within the private sector pertaining to the current status quo. As a solution, he noted that the federal government should further expand its competencies. Overall, the Swiss hacking back debate largely follows in the same footsteps and argumentative patterns of similar discussions abroad - particularly in the United States - over the past two decades. Subsequently, so far there has not been an argument that might possibly push the hacking back discussion to the next level. So, let us try to fix that. From the onset we have to be clear about the terminology we are using. Hacking back has nothing to do with Active Cyber Defense (ACD). In fact, ACD is so ill-defined that it means different things to different people at different times in different places. For the US Department of Defense, ACD synchronizes real-time detection, analysis, and mitigation of threats to critical networks and systems. And even though ACD “is active within the networks it protects, it is not offensive and its capabilities affect only the networks where they have been installed by network operators and owners.”5 On the other end of the equation are people like Gary McGraw, then Chief Technology Officer at Cigital, who wrote in TechTarget seven years ago that, “any active defence strategy is going to involve the use of a security hole that is exploited on the original attacker's system.”6 Even Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima had a hard time figuring out back in 2013 what ACD actually encompassed, noting that “in the parlance of network security, digital deception is known as a type of ‘active defense,’ a controversial and sometimes ill-defined approach that could include techniques as aggressive as knocking a server offline.”7 One look at the Wikipedia pages on ‘active defense,’ ‘proactive cyber defense,’ and ‘cyber self-defense’ ought to be enough to confuse any reader on the coherence of the ACD term and its popular usage.8 The bottom line is this: hacking back has nothing to do with defence no matter how many adjectives we slap in front of it. Hacking back is 4 Curdin Vincenz, ‘Angriff als beste Verteidigung gegen Hacker,‘ SRF, November 5, 2011. 5 NSA, ‘Active Cyber Defense (ACD),’ NSA/CSS, August 4, 2015. https://apps.nsa.gov/iaarchive/programs/iad-initiatives/active-cyber-defense.cfm 6 Gary McGraw, ‘Cyberwar calls for software and system investment, not hacking back,’ TechTarget, March 2013. 7 Ellen Nakashima, ‘To thwart hackers, firms salting their servers with fake data,’ The Washington Post, January 2, 2013. 8 Wikipedia, ‘Proactive Cyber Defence.’; Wikipedia, ‘Active Defense.’; Wikipedia, ‘Cyber Self-Defense.’ Note: It is rather ironic that there is literally no Wikipedia page on the specific term ‘active cyber defense’ 2 Hacking Back unpacked: an eye for an eye? Not so fast ARI 3/2020 - 14/1/2021 - Elcano Royal Institute offensive. Hacking back is aggressive. And hacking back plays by different rules than classical network defenders do. Period. Three cases-studio of hacking back We also have to be clear about what exactly we mean by hacking back. But before we embark on that journey, let us first add some context by looking at three historical cases that – in my opinion – have significantly shaped our understanding of what hacking back encompasses today. The first case is found in Cliff Stoll’s 1989 book The Cuckoo’s egg.9 For those who have not yet read it: read it. It is a classic and an amazing read. Suffice to say, at one point in Cliff’s adventure, he decides to figure out whether it would be possible for an adversary to gain access to the network of the MITRE Corporation, and thereby use MITRE as a hub to dial out into other networks – including Berkeley where Cliff himself was sitting and seeing the adversary connecting to his system from MITRE. As he describes it in his own words: “I’d go home and try to use the international data communication network Tymnet to connect to MITRE, trying to break into a place I wasn’t supposed to be.” So, on the next day, Cliff dials into MITRE’s internal network. No password required. He then dials out into Berkeley and is able to connect – confirming his ‘hub’ hypothesis. At this point, Cliff could have just exited MITRE’s network, but he did not. He went on to access MITRE’s Aerovax system through a guest account. Again, no password necessary. Then by pure coincidence he stumbles upon a trojan horse the adversary deployed to collect login information from MITRE’s legitimate users. Overall, as Cliff puts it, “I remember an hour poking around MITRE’s internal network. At once it felt exciting and forbidden. Any minute, I expected someone to send a message on my computer screen, ‘We caught you. Come out with your hands up.’” The following day, Cliff decided to call up his contact at MITRE, hinting at the trojan horse in their system. But as Cliff himself explained, “I couldn’t admit that I’d danced through his system yesterday, discovering the Trojan Horse.”10 What Cliff did, would be considered a classical hack back in the old days. Yet from today’s perspective, would anyone judge Cliff’s actions as illegal and subsequently sentence him to pay a fine or even go to prison? Maybe… but highly likely not. The second case occurred in June 1998, when the security researcher and former FBI informant Max Ray Butler exploited a vulnerability – which was discovered three months earlier - in a piece of software called the BIND ‘named’ domain server. According to Kevin Poulson over at Securityfocus, Butler was concerned that government networks would not patch the vulnerability and thus decided to launch “a program that scanned for vulnerable Defense Department systems, cracked them, then closed the hole in each of them -- forestalling attacks from other hackers. Less altruistically, Butler's program created a back door on every system it penetrated, which the hacker could have used to gain access later.” In 2001, Butler was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Being 9 The book is based on the well-known investigation of the author at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to discover the hacker Markus Hess in 1986.
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