Politico quotes Cyber Statecraft Initiative Nonresident Senior Fellow Jason Healey on the powerful hidden capabilities of the US cyberwarfare program:
“Anything that has a computer anywhere on earth can be stopped or taken over,” said Jason Healey, the head of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and former director for cyber infrastructure protection in the George W. Bush White House from 2003 to 2005.
The most powerful cyber capabilities, called “zero-days,” exploit software vulnerabilities unknown even to the author of the software itself—for example, a security hole in the Windows operating system that even Microsoft doesn’t know is there. They’re called zero-days because once discovered, the author has zero days to fix them—people can immediately use them to cause damage.