AntiHacker Executive Order

President Barack Obama says the ongoing increase in hack attacks against U.S. businesses, government agencies and critical infrastructure represents a `national emergency.`. As a result, he signed an executive order authorizing the U.S. government to block or seize the assets of anyone - foreign or domestic - who launches or supports `significant` hack attacks.

Numerous information security and legal experts agree that not only are hack attacks damaging the U.S. economy, but they`re harder than ever to battle. `Coordinated government action, both nationally and internationally, is urgently needed to attack those elements of the global cybercrime infrastructure that only persist due to the complicity of corrupt officials and unscrupulous businesses that turn a blind eye to cybercrime,` says Stephen Cobb, a senior security researcher at Slovakia-based information security vendor ESET.

But when it comes to how the new executive order will be used to battle cybercrime and online espionage, many security experts say the moves leave many unanswered questions. Here are a few of their chief concerns:

1. Evidentiary Requirements

White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel, in an April 1 press call, said the executive order is meant to expand the `spectrum of tools` the government can use to battle cyber-attacks, by supplementing current diplomatic, economic, intelligence, law enforcement and military options. `What we`re trying to do is enable us to have a new way of deterring and imposing costs on malicious cyber actors, wherever they might be,` he said.

The executive order, reportedly two years in the making, sees the government continuing to take a more aggressive stance against hack attacks, for example by indicting in May 2014 five Chinese military officers for stealing U.S. intellectual property via hacking.

But the order will now allow federal prosecutors - working with the Department of the Treasury and the Secretary of State - to seize individual`s assets without due process. `It allows the government to bypass due process and seize the assets of anybody suspected of hacking,` says Robert David Graham, head of offensive security research firm Errata Security, in a blog post. `The federal government already widely abuses `asset forfeiture` laws, seizing a billion dollars annually,` he says. `This executive order expands such activities - although freezing isn`t quite the same as forfeiture.`

In response to related questions, Daniel noted that before imposing anti-hacker sanctions, U.S. officials must satisfy the evidence-gathering rules of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the internal procedures of the U.S. government`s administrative agencies. Those stipulate that the administration must satisfy `reasonable cause` evidence requirements.

2. First Targets?

Daniel declined to say if the White House had already drawn up a target list for anti-hacking sanctions. But many security experts suspect such sanctions would begin with China. `Presumably, in the next few weeks, we`ll see announcements from the Treasury Department seizing assets from Chinese companies known to have stolen intellectual property via hacking,` Graham says.

But then again, the administration has remained silent over the recent distributed denial-of-service attack against GitHub, which is based in San Francisco. Graham - after tracing back the attack packets - reports that `the man-in-the-middle machine attacking GitHub is located on or near the Great Firewall of China,` meaning the disruption was apparently launched using Chinese government infrastructure.

Read original article