‘Only a matter of time’ before cyber attacks are viewed as acts of war: Ex-NSA chief

Michael Rogers, the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency, warned that foreign adversaries like Russia and China were edging closer into uncharted cyber warfare territory as they continued digital attacks on infrastructure and military installations worldwide.

So far, such cyber attacks haven’t crossed the threshold of constituting an act of war, Rogers told Semafor’s Gina Chon during a pre-recorded interview played at the Securing the Digital Future event on Tuesday. “It’s only a matter of time, though, before we cross this Rubicon,” he said.

Rogers said that China was penetrating critical infrastructure in countries like the U.S., Taiwan, and South Korea for “reconnaissance” and to understand the network structures in order to “go destructive” in the event of a war or crisis.

He acknowledged that there is no clear definition of what an “active war in cyber is,” and that just penetrating a network is not sufficient grounds to define as an act of war.

Rogers told Semafor that both the private and public sectors have developed better information sharing protocols that have helped increase cybersecurity protection over the last decade, with many of those systems evolving after the 2014 North Korean hack of Sony Pictures.

However, the idea that foreign adversaries could no longer penetrate U.S. systems, “is not realistic, in at least the near term,” Rogers said. “We need to be focused on cyber security, not just from a cyber defense perspective.. make the castle walls taller thicker, build a deeper moat.”

He also called for the U.S. to build more resilience to cyber attacks and develop the ability to stop an entity from moving rapidly through the system.

Rogers addressed the role of artificial intelligence in the government’s threat-detecting abilities, calling AI a “double-edged sword.”

Rogers said that AI would allow for the U.S. to generate more intelligence about what adversaries are doing, but also increase the hacking capabilities of those adversaries.

“It will enable them to generate better malware...malware that understands some of the defensive capabilities that are embedded in systems and therefore can bypass it or overcome it,” he said. “It will enable attackers to simulate, to anticipate, what kind of defensive moves companies and targets are going to put into place.”