“How Tough Is It to Tell Who Launched a Cyber Attack?”

The word attribution always crops up when experts debate the challenges of deterring a cyber attack. It simply means determining just who is responsible for nefarious acts online — where anonymity has long been a prized asset. Here, I discuss the challenge of finding such digital fingerprints with James Lewis, a cyberwar expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Kristin Lord, who recently edited a Center for a New American Security study on U.S. cyber-vulnerabilities, and John Nagl, CNAS’s president and a member of the Pentagon’s independent Defense Policy Board.