What is the high ground in cyberspace?

I can't even possibly get into how crazy hilarious most of the proposed cyber norms are. Usually the response is "What does the technical community know? and then a few years later, "Hmm. That didn't work." even though it was entirely predictable.

High Ground (C.F. Thomas Dullien)

High ground in cyber is high traffic sites! Facebook and Google are "unsinkable aircraft carriers" in that sense, but any site which has a huge traffic share is high ground, most of them have very low security, and there's lots of mountain ranges we don't acknowledge the existence of.

This screencap from Matt Tait's 2018 INFILTRATE keynote talks about update providers as strategic risks...

RedTube and other major porn sites have a wider reach than the New York Times ever will. Gaming sites are equally high ground. Dating sites are clearly high ground. There's what you think people do on the Internet versus what they really do, almost everywhere you look, which is why good strategists are holding themselves to the hard data they get from historical operations, and not just making up fanciful cyber norms in Tallinn.

I think it's counter-intuitive to grasp that almost everything your computer does when it reaches out is "get more code to execute". Software Updates are the obvious one, but a web page is also just code executing. PDFs are code executing. Word documents are code executing. New TF2 maps are code executing. NVidia's driver download page is exceptionally high ground.

In other words, there's nothing your computer does that is not "updates" when it comes to understanding your strategic risk.

Team Composition

We covered team compositions as applied to cyber operations quite heavily in our talk at T2 in Finland. To quickly summarize: Dive Tanks are going to be implants that are more "RAT"-like. These typically are entirely in userspace, and operate in the grey zones and chaotic areas of your operating system. Main tanks tend to be kernelspace or below. Obviously your implant strategy changes everything about what else you incorporate into your operations.

Win Condition

In Overwatch, one win condition is "we have a ranged DPS on the high ground, unopposed". Knowing the win conditions is important because it keeps you from wasting time and "feeding" your opponents when the battle is already lost. In cyber operations, feeding your opponents is quite simply using new exploits and implants when your current ones have already been caught. This is why a good team will immediately remove all their implants and cease operations once they even get a hint that they were discovered.

Unlike in Overwatch, the win condition in cyber is usually who is more covert than the other person. You don't have to remove your opponent from the field, you just have to make it irrelevant they are there.

Conclusion

Keeping your strategy as simple as possible allows for a high tempo of operations with a predictable and scalable results. Create a proper toolkit composition, execute the right tactical positioning based on your composition, and understand your win condition, and you will end up a grandmaster. :)