[DickingAround]

I think if you had good attribution it's more like armies. We have been focused on locking our doors, on building better walls, etc. But there is a non-defensive side.

In meatspace we expect the government to use kinetic force to stop people from attacking us. Like if I leave my door unlocked and some person comes in to start stealing my stuff, the cops really will respond and come stop that person (I have had a home breakin they responded quickly to). They didn't blame me for having bad locks. I pay a lot of taxes so my walls and locks don't have to be perfect.

In cyber land, it's an anarchy. The government offers no defense. But there's no reason someone can't offer a deterrent. Like if you knew who broke into your servers, and there was a goon squad that went and broke down their door either kinetically or electronically I think a deterrent strategy could eventually work. Like it literally does for meat-space security.

(Not totally sure I want that, but I'm just saying it would probably work and we haven't really tried it yet.)

[unionpivo]

So you have group of 20 somethings in russia that you suspect are behind the hack.

What do you do ? Sending a single missile/drone wont work because Russia has air defense (probably - with them you never know how on top they are, but they will after the 1st one). Sending multiple might work, but Russia might fire back and start a war.

Sending special forces, or whatever would probably work better first few times, until Russia deliberately set's a trap for them.

How about if they are form China, or maybe France or India and you don't relay have prof that would stand in court ?

And then what, it's not like USA doesn't have its own hackers that do shady stuff internationally. Other countries have spacial forces as well.

I am not sure we want to go this way.

In practice that means US doing whatever they want in poor countries (where they already do whatever they want), and not doing much in powerful enough countries where most of those criminals actually are.

Most of the time we don't even know definitively who is behind the hacks, so it's kind of a moot point.

[DickingAround]

Yea, I'm not saying I want a kinetic or offensive solution either. More like, it might be possible. Like if someone kills a bunch of people in France and flees to Germany, then Germany is going to hand them back over to France. Clearly not everywhere has extraditions, but you can imagine a world where hacking isn't so much tolerated and defended against as punished and thus uncommon (like breaking into a house; you can but you're not supposed to and there's consequences).

[unionpivo]

oh this happens regularly inside EU. And even cooperating with US. A few years ago, someone from town I live was involved in making/selling one of those exploit toolkits on dark web. FBI contacted our police, he got arrested, and convicted. He didn't get extradited to US, but is in prison here.

It's not that uncommon.