cyberscoop.com
article By
Tim Starks
August 27, 2025
Google says it is starting a cyber “disruption unit,” a development that arrives in a potentially shifting U.S. landscape toward more offensive-oriented approaches in cyberspace.

But the contours of that larger shift are still unclear, and whether or to what extent it’s even possible. While there’s some momentum in policymaking and industry circles to put a greater emphasis on more aggressive strategies and tactics to respond to cyberattacks, there are also major barriers.

Sandra Joyce, vice president of Google Threat Intelligence Group, said at a conference Tuesday that more details of the disruption unit would be forthcoming in future months, but the company was looking for “legal and ethical disruption” options as part of the unit’s work.

“What we’re doing in the Google Threat Intelligence Group is intelligence-led proactive identification of opportunities where we can actually take down some type of campaign or operation,” she said at the Center for Cybersecurity Policy and Law event, where she called for partners in the project. “We have to get from a reactive position to a proactive one … if we’re going to make a difference right now.”

The boundaries in the cyber domain between actions considered “cyber offense” and those meant to deter cyberattacks are often unclear. The tradeoff between “active defense” vs. “hacking back” is a common dividing line. On the less aggressive end, “active defense” can include tactics like setting up honeypots designed to lure and trick attackers. At the more extreme end, “hacking back” would typically involve actions that attempt to deliberately destroy an attacker’s systems or networks. Disruption operations might fall between the two, like Microsoft taking down botnet infrastructure in court or the Justice Department seizing stolen cryptocurrency from hackers.

Trump administration officials and some in Congress have been advocating for the U.S. government to go on offense in cyberspace, saying that foreign hackers and criminals aren’t suffering sufficient consequences. Much-criticized legislation to authorize private sector “hacking back” has long stalled in Congress, but some have recently pushed a version of the idea where the president would give “letters of marque” like those for early-U.S. sea privateers to companies authorizing them to legally conduct offensive cyber operations currently forbidden under U.S. law.

The private sector has some catching up to do if there’s to be a worthy field of firms able to focus on offense, experts say.

John Keefe, a former National Security Council official from 2022 to 2024 and National Security Agency official before that, said there had been government talks about a “narrow” letters of marque approach “with the private sector companies that we thought had the capabilities.” The concept was centered on ransomware, Russia and rules of the road for those companies to operate. “It wasn’t going to be the Wild West,” said Keefe, now founder of Ex Astris Scientia, speaking like others in this story at Tuesday’s conference.

The companies with an emphasis on offense largely have only one customer — and that’s governments, said Joe McCaffrey, chief information security officer at defense tech company Anduril Industries. “It’s a really tough business to be in,” he said. “If you develop an exploit, you get to sell to one person legally, and then it gets burned, and you’re back again.”

By their nature, offensive cyber operations in the federal government are already very time- and manpower-intensive, said Brandon Wales, a former top official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and now vice president of cybersecurity at SentinelOne. Private sector companies could make their mark by innovating ways to speed up and expand the number of those operations, he said.

Overall, among the options of companies that could do more offensive work, the “industry doesn’t exist yet, but I think it’s coming,” said Andrew McClure, managing director at Forgepoint Capital.

Certainly Congress would have to clarify what companies are able to do legally as well, Wales said.

But that’s just the industry side. There’s plenty more to weigh when stepping up offense.

“However we start, we need to make sure that we are having the ability to measure impact,” said Megan Stifel, chief strategy officer for the Institute for Security and Technology. “Is this working? How do we know?”
If there was a consensus at the conference it’s that the United States — be it the government or private sector — needs to do more to deter adversaries in cyberspace by going after them more in cyberspace.

One knock on that idea has been that the United States can least afford to get into a cyber shooting match, since it’s more reliant on tech than other nations and an escalation would hurt the U.S. the most by presenting more vulnerable targets for enemies. But Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said that idea was wrong for a couple reasons, among them that other nations have become just as reliant on tech, too.

And “the very idea that in this current bleak state of affairs, engaging in cyber offense is escalatory, I propose to you, is laughable,” he said. “After all, what are our adversaries going to escalate to in response? Ransom more of our hospitals, penetrate more of our water and electric utilities, steal even more of our IP and financial assets?”

Alperovitch continued: “Not only is engaging in thoughtful and careful cyber offense not escalatory, but not doing so is.”

cyberscoop.com August 20, 2025 - A Russian state-sponsored group known as Static Tundra has persistently exploited the Cisco CVE-2018-0171 vulnerability to compromise network devices worldwide, targeting key industries and evading detection for years, according to new findings by Cisco Talos.
The group, designated “Static Tundra” by Cisco Talos, is linked to the Russian Federal Security Service’s Center 16 unit and operates as a likely sub-cluster of the broader “Energetic Bear” threat group. The operation represents one of the most persistent network device compromise campaigns documented to date, with the group maintaining undetected access to victim systems for multiple years.

According to the researchers, the group has been leveraging CVE-2018-0171, a vulnerability in Cisco IOS software’s Smart Install feature that was patched when initially disclosed in 2018. Despite the availability of patches, the group continues to find success targeting organizations that have left devices unpatched or are running end-of-life equipment that cannot be updated.

The vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected devices or trigger denial-of-service conditions.

Researchers believe the group has developed automated tooling to exploit the vulnerability at scale, likely identifying targets through publicly available network scanning data from services such as Shodan or Censys.

Once initial access is gained, the group employs sophisticated techniques to extract device configuration data, which often contains credentials and network information valuable for further compromise. The attackers use a combination of Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) servers and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) tools to maintain access and collect intelligence.

The espionage campaign has affected organizations in telecommunications, higher education, and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Victim selection appears to align with Russia’s strategic interests, with researchers noting a significant escalation in operations against Ukrainian entities following the onset of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“One of the clearer targeting shifts we observed was that Static Tundra’s operations against entities in Ukraine escalated at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, and have remained high since then,” the Cisco Talos report states. The group expanded its targeting within Ukraine from selective, limited compromises to operations across multiple industry verticals.