Cybersecurity » Hack Back Advocates Claim Right To Counterattack

Hack Back Advocates Claim Right To Counterattack

July 25, 2017

Security concept with businessman and hacker hands on laptop keyboard
The debate about whether companies that suffer cybersecurity breaches should be allowed to crash the servers that attack them, and/or delete stolen data off their adversaries’ machines tends to heat up after major breaches, such as the recent WannaCry ransomware attack. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes such counter attacks effectively illegal, but Stewart Baker, a partner at the D.C. law firm Steptoe & Johnson and former homeland security assistant secretary under George W. Bush wants companies to be allowed to hack back. He compares asking the FBI to find the perpetrator of a hack to somebody going to the police in a university town and saying somebody stole my bike. “You’re lucky if they don’t laugh at you,” he says. A bill allowing retaliatory hacks has been introduced in Congress.

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