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A New Era of Government-Directed Cyber Power
The United States has taken a striking step toward a more aggressive model of cyber defense: private cybersecurity companies may now participate in offensive cyber operations against foreign transnational criminal organizations under direct federal government control.
President Donald Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum on August 12, 2026, establishing a framework intended to give federal law enforcement greater access to the technical capabilities, intelligence, infrastructure, and expertise of the private sector. The policy is aimed primarily at foreign criminal organizations involved in ransomware, financial fraud, scams, and other cyber-enabled crimes targeting Americans.
This is more than another cybersecurity policy announcement. It represents a significant philosophical shift in how Washington approaches cybercrime. For years, private companies have largely been expected to defend their customers, share threat intelligence, investigate intrusions, and help law enforcement understand criminal infrastructure. The new framework moves the relationship closer to operational cooperation, allowing vetted private-sector organizations to participate in government-directed cyber operations.
The White House argues that the private sector possesses capabilities that the government has historically underused. Cybersecurity companies already monitor enormous portions of the global internet, track ransomware infrastructure, identify malicious domains, reverse-engineer malware, map criminal ecosystems, and observe attacker behavior at a scale that individual government agencies cannot always reproduce.
The question now is whether that technical advantage can be converted into offensive power without creating an even larger security problem.
What the New Memorandum Actually Changes
The memorandum does not simply give private companies permission to independently “hack back” at attackers. That distinction is extremely important.
Under the framework described by the White House, participating companies would operate under the direction, control, and authority of the U.S. government. The program is designed to allow companies to gather intelligence on transnational criminal organizations and propose operations intended to disrupt their activities.
The Department of Homeland Security, through the Homeland Security Task Force’s National Coordination Center, will establish the program. Oversight will involve the Department of Justice and DHS, with two executive directors responsible for managing the initiative.
The memorandum also describes operations that can involve cyber surveillance as well as “cyber effects.” In practical terms, that can encompass actions intended to manipulate, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy information systems, networks, infrastructure controlled by those systems, or information stored on them.
That language is substantially more consequential than ordinary threat intelligence sharing.
Why Washington Wants This Capability
The motivation is easy to understand.
Cybercrime has become a global business ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated hackers. Ransomware groups operate affiliates. Initial-access brokers sell compromised credentials. Malware developers provide subscription-based platforms. Money launderers move cryptocurrency through complicated networks. Scam organizations maintain call centers, phishing infrastructure, fake investment platforms, and social engineering teams.
A single criminal organization can therefore operate across multiple countries while using infrastructure scattered across dozens of jurisdictions.
American investigators can identify the infrastructure, but actually disrupting it may require capabilities, authorities, and international cooperation that take considerable time.
The White House highlighted the scale of the financial problem, pointing to more than $20.8 billion in losses reported by American consumers from cyber-enabled crime in 2025.
That number is only one part of the picture. Businesses also face ransomware recovery costs, intellectual-property theft, fraud, operational disruption, regulatory expenses, insurance losses, and reputational damage.
From
The Private Sector Already Sees the Attackers First
One of the most important aspects of this policy is that private cybersecurity companies frequently have visibility into criminal infrastructure long before a traditional law-enforcement investigation reaches the same level of detail.
Security researchers can identify command-and-control servers, malicious domains, cryptocurrency wallets, phishing infrastructure, compromised hosting providers, malware families, and relationships between criminal actors.
Threat intelligence firms can sometimes observe an entire criminal campaign from multiple geographical locations simultaneously.
Cloud providers can identify suspicious infrastructure.
Domain registrars can see malicious registration patterns.
Incident-response companies can reconstruct intrusions from compromised systems.
Endpoint security vendors can see malware activity at enormous scale.
In other words, the private sector already possesses much of the technical intelligence required to understand modern cybercrime.
The controversial step is what happens after that intelligence has been collected.
From Intelligence Sharing to Cyber Operations
Traditionally, a security company might discover a ransomware server and report it to law enforcement, notify a hosting provider, share indicators with other defenders, or work with the provider to take infrastructure offline.
The new framework potentially moves the relationship further.
A vetted company could help develop an operational proposal for disrupting a criminal organization, with the operation ultimately conducted under government authority.
That could mean intelligence collection, infrastructure disruption, manipulation of attacker systems, or other controlled cyber effects.
This distinction matters because the operation is no longer simply defensive.
It becomes an action designed to change the adversary’s environment.
Why Attribution Is the Biggest Problem
The strongest criticism of the policy centers on attribution.
Cybercriminals are exceptionally good at hiding behind layers of infrastructure, compromised machines, bulletproof hosting providers, proxy networks, cryptocurrency services, stolen identities, and other criminal intermediaries.
A server located in one country does not necessarily belong to the person attacking an American company.
A domain registered by one individual may be controlled by another.
A compromised cloud server may belong to an innocent organization whose infrastructure was hijacked.
A ransomware group may deliberately route operations through systems belonging to unrelated victims.
That makes cyber attribution fundamentally different from identifying a physical criminal organization.
Nick Carr, technical director for
That concern should not be dismissed.
A mistake in defensive threat intelligence can cause a company to block legitimate traffic.
A mistake in an offensive operation could potentially affect another victim, compromise evidence, damage infrastructure, or trigger an international incident.
The “Hack Back” Label Is Useful — But Incomplete
The policy has inevitably been described as a form of government-authorized “hack back.”
The comparison is understandable, but it can also be misleading.
Traditional hack-back proposals generally envision a victim or private company independently retaliating against an attacker.
The framework announced by the White House is different in an important respect: operations are intended to remain under government direction and authorization.
That means the real issue is not simply whether companies can retaliate.
The larger issue is whether the United States is creating a formal public-private operational cyber capability in which private technical specialists can become part of government-authorized offensive missions.
That is a much bigger policy question.
Why the $1 Million Bond Matters
One detail receiving less attention deserves more scrutiny.
Participating companies will reportedly be required to maintain a bond or escrow account of at least $1 million.
The requirement suggests that the government recognizes the extraordinary legal and operational risks associated with allowing private entities to participate in these activities.
A financial requirement can create accountability, but money alone cannot solve attribution, escalation, or collateral-damage problems.
A million-dollar bond may be meaningful for a small security firm, but it is insignificant compared with the potential consequences of a serious international cyber incident.
The real safeguards will therefore need to come from authorization procedures, technical controls, intelligence validation, legal review, operational boundaries, auditability, and post-operation accountability.
The Escalation Problem
Cyber operations rarely behave like perfectly isolated computer commands.
An attacker may compromise a server that hosts several unrelated customers.
A criminal group may use infrastructure belonging to a cloud provider.
A command-and-control system may communicate with thousands of infected devices.
Disrupting one component can unexpectedly affect another.
More importantly, a criminal group may have undisclosed relationships with state-linked actors.
This creates a dangerous possibility: an operation intended to disrupt criminals could accidentally interfere with infrastructure connected to a government, military organization, intelligence service, or strategically important company.
The result could be escalation.
A cyber operation that begins as law enforcement activity could potentially be interpreted by another country as a hostile state action.
That is why attribution and deconfliction will be at the center of the program’s success or failure.
The International Dimension
Cybercrime does not respect national borders, and neither does cyber infrastructure.
A ransomware operator can live in one country, rent servers in another, target victims in the United States, launder money through a fourth jurisdiction, and store stolen data somewhere else.
The United States therefore faces a problem that cannot be solved entirely through domestic law enforcement.
But offensive cyber operations also interact with international law, diplomatic relationships, intelligence operations, military planning, and the sovereignty of other nations.
That makes government oversight essential.
The memorandum explicitly states that the program is intended to operate consistently with the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law, and relevant international agreements.
The practical implementation of that promise will be much more important than the wording itself.
The United Kingdom Provides an Interesting Comparison
The United States is not the first Western country to build a formal offensive cyber capability.
The United Kingdom created the National Cyber Force in 2020, bringing together capabilities from the country’s intelligence and defense communities.
The
The comparison is useful because it highlights an important distinction.
Offensive cyber capability does not automatically mean offensive cyber activity should be used every time an adversary is identified.
The most effective cyber strategy may involve intelligence collection, infrastructure takedowns, arrests, sanctions, financial disruption, diplomatic pressure, defensive measures, or international cooperation rather than destructive action.
The Cybersecurity Industry Is Divided
The cybersecurity
Some professionals see the policy as an overdue recognition that the private sector has become a critical component of national cyber power.
Security researchers often have extraordinary visibility into criminal ecosystems. They can identify infrastructure, track malware campaigns, connect seemingly unrelated attacks, and sometimes understand criminal operations faster than government agencies.
Chris Wysopal, co-founder of Veracode, described the policy as a major shift in U.S. cyber policy, while emphasizing that it goes beyond conventional private-sector cybersecurity work.
Others see the danger.
Cybersecurity professionals understand better than most people how easily attribution can fail.
They also understand that sophisticated attackers intentionally create false trails.
The same technical infrastructure can be used by multiple actors.
An innocent server can become part of an attack.
A legitimate organization can be compromised and unknowingly used as a staging point.
That means confidence levels and independent verification must be extraordinarily high before an operation is authorized.
Deep Analysis: What a Safe Operational Pipeline Should Look Like
A responsible implementation should begin with intelligence collection rather than immediate disruption.
Security teams should first aggregate indicators from endpoint telemetry, DNS records, malware analysis, identity systems, cloud logs, and network sensors.
For example, defenders can inspect suspicious network connections with tools such as:
Review active network connections
ss -tupn
Inspect DNS resolution for a suspicious domain
dig +short suspicious-example[.]com
Search logs for a known malicious IP
grep -R "203.0.113.10" /var/log/ 2>/dev/null
Calculate a file hash for malware identification
sha256sum suspicious-file.bin
These commands are defensive investigation examples. They help security teams validate evidence without providing instructions for unauthorized intrusion or retaliation.
A mature investigation should then correlate the indicators across multiple independent sources.
Search a local indicator database for an observed domain
grep -R "suspicious-example" ./threat-intelligence/
Search authentication logs for unusual activity
grep -Ei "failed|invalid|authentication" /var/log/auth.log
Review recent processes on a Linux endpoint
ps aux --sort=-%cpu | head -20
The critical principle is redundancy.
One indicator should rarely be enough to authorize a high-impact operation.
A suspicious IP address is evidence.
A suspicious IP address combined with malware telemetry, infrastructure overlap, behavioral indicators, cryptocurrency transactions, historical campaign data, and independent intelligence becomes a much stronger attribution package.
The next stage should involve legal review and operational deconfliction.
Before an operation is approved, investigators should ask whether the infrastructure belongs exclusively to the target, whether innocent third parties may be affected, whether another government agency is already operating against the same infrastructure, whether intelligence sources could be exposed, and whether the target may be connected to a state-sponsored organization.
Only after those questions have been answered should an operational proposal move forward.
AI Could Become a Major Force Multiplier
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension to this policy.
Modern cybersecurity operations increasingly rely on AI for malware classification, anomaly detection, threat-intelligence correlation, phishing analysis, vulnerability discovery, and large-scale log analysis.
A government-private-sector cyber program could potentially use AI to connect millions of indicators that would be difficult for human analysts to process manually.
For example, an AI-assisted system could identify relationships between domains, certificates, malware samples, infrastructure, wallets, usernames, and attack patterns.
That could dramatically improve attribution.
But AI can also amplify mistakes.
If a model incorrectly links two unrelated criminal ecosystems, analysts may become overly confident in a false conclusion.
The danger is particularly serious when an AI-generated assessment becomes part of the justification for a disruptive operation.
AI should therefore support attribution rather than replace human judgment.
The “Automation Trap” Must Be Avoided
The United States has spent years building automated cyber defense systems.
Blocking malicious domains can happen automatically.
Quarantining suspicious endpoints can happen automatically.
Disabling compromised credentials can happen automatically.
Offensive operations are fundamentally different.
The cost of a false positive is potentially much higher.
An automated defensive system can usually be reversed.
A destructive cyber operation may not be reversible.
For that reason, the closer an operation gets to manipulation, disruption, denial, degradation, or destruction, the stronger the requirement for human authorization should become.
Criminal Infrastructure Is Not Always Criminal-Owned Infrastructure
This is one of the most important technical realities policymakers must understand.
Attackers routinely compromise legitimate servers.
They hijack cloud accounts.
They rent infrastructure using stolen identities.
They exploit vulnerable routers.
They compromise websites.
They use residential proxies.
They abuse legitimate cloud platforms.
They infect personal computers and turn them into relay nodes.
Consequently, “the server used by the attacker” does not necessarily mean “the attacker’s server.”
That distinction should be embedded into every targeting procedure.
The Program Could Change the Cybersecurity Industry
If the initiative becomes operational at scale, it could create a new category of cybersecurity contractor.
Traditional security companies primarily sell defense.
Incident-response firms investigate breaches.
Threat-intelligence companies sell information.
Government contractors build specialized cyber capabilities.
The new framework could create organizations whose expertise includes both intelligence production and government-authorized operational support.
That could attract some of the
It could also create new commercial incentives around offensive cyber capability.
That is where strong procurement rules and conflict-of-interest controls become essential.
A company should never have an economic incentive to exaggerate the threat posed by a target simply because the company could profit from the resulting operation.
Why Transparency Will Matter
Offensive cyber operations are naturally secretive.
Details cannot simply be published.
However, secrecy cannot mean the absence of accountability.
Congressional oversight, inspectors general, legal review, internal auditing, after-action assessments, and carefully controlled reporting mechanisms could become essential parts of the program.
The public does not necessarily need to know exactly how an operation was conducted.
But policymakers should eventually be able to determine whether the operation was lawful, properly authorized, technically justified, proportionate, and effective.
A New Cyber Deterrence Strategy
The broader objective appears to be deterrence.
For years, criminal organizations have operated under the assumption that the probability of meaningful consequences is relatively low.
A ransomware group can attack hundreds of companies while operating from a jurisdiction that has little interest in arresting its members.
A scam network can steal billions while moving money through multiple countries.
A cybercrime-as-a-service provider can sell tools to criminals without ever directly attacking a victim.
The new policy attempts to change that calculation.
If criminal organizations know that U.S. authorities can identify and disrupt their infrastructure rather than simply investigate attacks after the fact, the expected cost of cybercrime could increase.
That is the strongest argument in favor of the program.
But Deterrence Can Backfire
There is another side.
If offensive operations become predictable, criminal groups may respond by becoming more decentralized, more encrypted, more destructive, and harder to attribute.
They could migrate from centralized infrastructure to peer-to-peer systems.
They could increase the use of compromised third-party infrastructure.
They could intentionally place malicious infrastructure inside sensitive networks to make retaliation more difficult.
They could even attempt to provoke an offensive response against innocent infrastructure.
Cybercriminals are adversaries capable of adapting quickly.
A successful program therefore needs to anticipate the adversary’s next move rather than simply disrupting today’s infrastructure.
What This Means for American Businesses
For ordinary businesses, the most important takeaway is not that companies can now launch their own cyber counterattacks.
They cannot simply decide to attack someone they believe is responsible for a ransomware incident.
The government-controlled framework is fundamentally different from unrestricted private retaliation.
Businesses should continue prioritizing conventional security controls: identity protection, multifactor authentication, vulnerability management, network segmentation, endpoint detection, secure backups, phishing resistance, logging, incident response, and threat intelligence.
The existence of offensive government capabilities does not reduce the importance of defensive cybersecurity.
If anything, the evolving threat environment makes those defenses even more important.
What This Means for Cybersecurity Professionals
Security professionals may find themselves increasingly involved in government-industry cyber operations.
Threat intelligence analysts could contribute attribution packages.
Malware researchers could identify criminal tooling.
Incident responders could reconstruct attack infrastructure.
Cloud-security specialists could help map abused infrastructure.
Reverse engineers could connect malware samples to known campaigns.
But the professional responsibility becomes greater as well.
Technical expertise must be paired with disciplined evidence handling.
The difference between “likely,” “high confidence,” and “confirmed” could become operationally significant.
What Undercode Say: The Real Battle Is Attribution
The most important part of this policy is not the ability to disrupt criminal infrastructure.
The most important part is deciding when the United States is sufficiently certain that the infrastructure belongs to the intended target.
Cybersecurity has an uncomfortable relationship with certainty.
Analysts often work with probabilities.
Attackers deliberately exploit that uncertainty.
False attribution is one of the most powerful weapons available to sophisticated threat actors.
A criminal group can deliberately route activity through another victim.
An intelligence service can imitate a criminal group.
A ransomware operator can steal another
A compromised server can make an innocent organization appear involved.
This means the new framework will succeed or fail on the quality of its intelligence pipeline.
More private-sector visibility could actually improve attribution if information from multiple independent companies is combined.
Threat intelligence vendors collectively observe enormous portions of the cyber ecosystem.
Government agencies possess classified intelligence that private companies cannot access.
Law enforcement can connect cyber activity to financial and human intelligence.
Combining those sources could produce an attribution picture substantially stronger than any individual organization could develop alone.
But there is a major danger in assuming that more data automatically means better attribution.
Large datasets can create convincing but incorrect correlations.
AI can make those correlations appear even more authoritative.
A sophisticated dashboard can make an uncertain conclusion look like a fact.
That is why operational decisions need independent verification.
The program should establish a hierarchy of evidence.
Technical indicators should be evaluated alongside behavioral patterns.
Infrastructure relationships should be tested against alternative explanations.
Financial information should be independently validated.
Human intelligence should be separated from assumptions.
AI-generated assessments should be treated as analytical support rather than proof.
Most importantly, investigators should actively search for evidence that disproves their preferred attribution.
That sounds obvious.
In practice, it is one of the hardest disciplines in intelligence analysis.
Another concern is mission creep.
A program created to target foreign transnational criminal organizations could gradually expand if its boundaries are not clearly maintained.
The distinction between criminal organizations, hacktivists, intelligence services, military organizations, political groups, and state proxies can become complicated very quickly.
The more ambiguous the target, the greater the risk of escalation.
The United States therefore needs a bright operational line between criminal disruption and military or intelligence activity.
There is also a question of proportionality.
Not every cybercriminal campaign requires the same response.
A phishing operation targeting thousands of consumers is serious, but a destructive action against infrastructure could have consequences beyond the original crime.
The response should be proportional to the threat.
Another issue is accountability.
If a government agency makes an operational mistake, established oversight mechanisms exist.
If a private company makes a mistake while operating under government authority, responsibility can become much harder to understand.
Who is accountable?
The company?
The government official who approved the operation?
The intelligence analyst who identified the target?
The contractor who executed the technical action?
The answer must be established before something goes wrong, not afterward.
The $1 million bond requirement is therefore only one component of accountability.
The program will need detailed operational logs, approval records, evidence preservation, audit trails, and post-operation reviews.
Cyber operations should be treated as evidence-driven missions, not as technical experiments.
The private
Security companies possess technical talent that governments often struggle to recruit and retain.
They also have global visibility that can be extremely difficult for a single government organization to reproduce.
If that expertise is combined with government authority and intelligence, the United States could build a much more capable response to transnational cybercrime.
The challenge is ensuring that capability remains disciplined.
Offensive cyber power is not automatically effective cyber policy.
Sometimes the best operation is disruption.
Sometimes it is surveillance.
Sometimes it is an arrest.
Sometimes it is a financial investigation.
Sometimes it is quietly taking infrastructure offline.
Sometimes it is collecting intelligence for months before acting.
The smartest cyber strategy is not the one that launches the most attacks.
It is the one that produces the greatest security effect with the smallest unintended consequence.
That principle should become the foundation of this new program.
✅ Confirmed: The Memorandum Was Signed on August 12, 2026
President Donald Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum on August 12, establishing the framework for government-directed cyber operations against foreign transnational criminal organizations. Reuters independently reported the signing and described the initiative as a major expansion of public-private cyber cooperation.
✅ Confirmed: Private Companies Are Intended to Participate Under Government Control
The policy does not simply authorize unrestricted private-sector retaliation. Participating companies are expected to be vetted and operate under the direction, control, and authority of the U.S. government.
✅ Confirmed: DHS and DOJ Will Have Oversight Roles
The Homeland Security Task
✅ Confirmed: Cyber Effects Can Include Disruption and Destruction
The
✅ Confirmed: A $1 Million Bond or Escrow Requirement Exists
Participating companies are required to maintain a bond or escrow of at least $1 million, according to the memorandum’s framework as reported by Reuters.
⚠️ Context Required: “Hack Back” Is Not an Exact Description
Calling the policy “hack back” captures its offensive character but oversimplifies the framework. The memorandum establishes government-directed operations rather than giving ordinary companies an unrestricted right to retaliate against attackers.
⚠️ Context Required: Offensive Cyber Operations Are Not Automatically Cyber Warfare
The framework focuses on transnational criminal organizations, but operations involving foreign infrastructure can create geopolitical consequences. Whether an individual operation crosses into a broader state-level confrontation depends on the target, circumstances, authorization, and consequences.
Prediction
(+1) The United States Will Build a More Integrated Public-Private Cyber Operations Ecosystem
The most likely positive outcome is the creation of a much tighter relationship between government intelligence agencies and major cybersecurity companies.
Private firms already possess extraordinary visibility into ransomware, malware, phishing, cryptocurrency fraud, botnets, and criminal infrastructure.
Government agencies possess legal authorities and intelligence capabilities that private companies lack.
Combining those strengths could produce a powerful model for disrupting transnational cybercrime.
Over the next several years, expect threat intelligence, AI-assisted attribution, malware research, cloud telemetry, and government intelligence to become increasingly interconnected.
The biggest success stories will probably come from operations where the government does not simply “attack back,” but instead combines intelligence, financial investigations, infrastructure disruption, arrests, sanctions, and international cooperation.
The policy could ultimately make cybercrime more expensive and less predictable for criminal organizations.
But that positive outcome depends on one condition above all others: the United States must become better at knowing exactly who it is targeting before it acts.
If attribution becomes stronger, the policy could represent one of the most consequential changes in American cyber strategy in years.
If attribution fails, the same capability could become a source of escalation, collateral damage, and international tension.
The technology is powerful.
The intelligence discipline behind it will determine whether that power makes America safer.
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