CAPITOL HILL: Maybe cyberspace isn’t as fragile as it’s made out to be. “Relax, Chicken Little, the sky isn’t falling,” said Columbia professor Abraham Wagner. “Protection ultimately is easier than penetration.”

Wagner’s argument reverses the conventional wisdom that the attacker always has the advantage online. A forthcoming study by the Cyber Conflict Studies Association, for example, says that even a good offense is no defense, because it’s so easy to hide who really launched a particular attack — the notorious “attribution problem” — that it’s nigh-impossible to know whom to retaliate against. But Wagner and several other cyber experts assembled Thursday by the hawkish American Foreign Policy Council collectively suggested that both defense and deterrence are doable, even against hackers backed by nation-states like Russia, China, and Iran. Keep reading →