This week’s news that Microsoft, Facebook, FireEye, and Google disrupted ongoing Russian and Iranian influence campaigns should garner significant attention in corporate boardrooms. The revelation of this fresh round of foreign hacking highlights important points about the intersection of business, geopolitics, and hacking that too often go overlooked — points that are especially important for platform businesses.
Even if geopolitics is the root cause of hacking attempts, corporations may find themselves on the front lines — both as victims but also, increasingly, as defenders. The coordinated action by Microsoft and the cybersecurity company FireEye, coupled with similar action by Facebook and, later, Google, demonstrates as much. The role of the U.S. government in pushing back against these foreign intelligence operations remains at best uncertain, though we can assume that classification and secrecy hide some actions from the public. Nonetheless, as Eric Rosenbach, then a senior cyber policy official at the Pentagon, testified in 2015, “The Department of Defense is not here to defend against all cyberattacks — only that top 2% — the most serious.” Far more frequently, the government isn’t rushing to the rescue.
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