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President Donald Trump has singed a memo letting private companies carry out offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal groups, work that until now has been the government’s alone.
Getting into it: The national security presidential memorandum, signed Wednesday, directs the administration to “leverage the capability and innovation of the private sector to help conduct these cyber operations under the direction, control, and authority of the U.S. Government.” The Department of Homeland Security, working through the Homeland Security Task Force’s National Coordination Center, will build a program to disrupt what the memo calls foreign transnational criminal organizations, with DHS and the Justice Department jointly overseeing it.
Vetted companies will be cleared for two categories of work: cyber surveillance operations and cyber effects operations. The memo defines the latter as the “manipulation, disruption, denial, degradation, or destruction of information systems, networks, physical or virtual infrastructure controlled by information systems, or information resident thereon.” Companies have to put up a bond or escrow of at least $1 million to get in the door, and they lose it if they break the terms of the deal.
The framework also encourages participating firms to strike agreements with other private entities and with federal, state, local, tribal and territorial agencies to collect threat intelligence and pitch operations against specific targets. The White House fact sheet points to ransomware, financial fraud and other crimes run out of foreign jurisdictions as the justification.
The administration has been laying groundwork for this for months, and the idea has never been an easy sell. Cybersecurity experts and former officials have warned for years that handing offensive operations to contractors could break coordination between agencies, produce consequences nobody planned for, and push a conflict further than intended. Supporters counter that the government cannot hire its way to enough talent and that a bigger pool of operators means more capacity against threats that keep growing.
As of now, DHS and the White House have not responded to requests for more detail on the program.
