Fighting the ‘Good’ Internet War

Abstract

We review the current strategies to counter Internet threats under the light of the classic strategy literature. The literature often advocates proactive action, and dominance of the (virtual, in our case) battlefield, which is the opposite from what we see defenders deploy today. Their actions are instead reactive and exclusively defensive. We propose strategies for defenders to regain the initiative and push security solutions far beyond the reach of current security tools — yet those strategies start mirroring the actions and technologies of the bad guys, and confront us with important technical, legal and moral dilemmas.