Saturday, February 11, 2017

The TAO Strategy's Weakness: Hal Fucking Martin the Third



I want everyone to watch the video above, but think of it in terms of how to build a cyber war grand strategy. 21-year-old aggressive-as-fuck me thought that the whole strategy of TAO was stupid. But I couldn't say why because I was all raw ID the way 21 year olds all are. "Scale is good" people intuitively think  - we need to be able to do this with a massive body of people we can train up.

40 yo me has proposed an insane idea - as different from the way we do things now as a Eukaryota is from the Bacteria and Archaea that we evolved from. I cloak it in "hack back" or "active defense", but the truth is that it stems from a single philosophy I've held my whole life, one that dates to when TESO and ADM were ripping their way through the Mesozoic Internet.

It is this simple phrase: You should not use the exploit if you cannot write it. The truth is, I cannot write the exploits that Scrippie writes. But I for sure understand them. Let that be our bar then - a nucleus composed of small teams of people who understand the exploits they are using, but don't share them or any of their other infrastructure with other teams.

We talk a little bit about dwell time here. But we are now in an age when the dwell time of a hacker in your system who doesn't have full access and analysis and exfiltration of your data is zero. How does your strategy of "hunting" handle that era? And this applies to our and other country's cyber offense teams more than anywhere else. We have a knife made out of pure information and all the SAPs in the world can't save us with the current structure we have.

In summary, how many separate exploit and implant and infrastructure and methodology chains do we really need to obtain dominance over this space? "So many", as Bri would say.

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