On March 31, Erica Borghard published an article in Harvard Kennedy School’s Russia Matters on the appropriate response to the SolarWinds breach. She argues that a retaliatory option would be unwise, but that this does not mean that deterrence strategies are irrelevant for cyberspace.
“A punitive response to SolarWinds is unwise because the available evidence indicates that the objective of the operation was national security espionage. However, this does not mean that the pursuit of deterrence strategies to address other types of malicious behavior in cyberspace, beyond espionage, is a fool’s errand. Deterrence is not a one-size-fits-all concept in cyberspace—or in any other domain.”
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