INTRODUCTION national businesses and our allies and partners The Administration is already taking action to without paying costs likely to deter future cyber aggressively address these threats and adjust to aggression. China engaged in cyber-enabled new realities. The United States has sanctioned economic espionage and trillions of dollars of malign cyber actors and indicted those that intellectual property theft. Non-state actors have committed cybercrimes. We have publicly — including terrorists and attributed malicious activity to criminals — exploited cyberthe responsible adversaries and space to profit, recruit, propareleased details of the tools and “We will continue t o l e a d t h e w o r l d i n gandize, and attack the United infrastructure they employed. securing a prosperous States and its allies and We have required departcyber future.” partners, with their actions ments and agencies to remove DONALD J. TRUMP S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 often shielded by hostile software vulnerable to various states. Public and private security risks. We have taken entities have struggled to action to hold department secure their systems as adversaries increase the and agency heads accountable for managing the frequency and sophistication of their malicious cybersecurity risks to systems they control, while cyber activities. Entities across the United empowering them to provide adequate security. States have faced cybersecurity challenges The Administration’s approach to cyberspace is in effectively identifying, protecting, and anchored by enduring American values, such as ensuring resilience of their networks, systems, the belief in the power of individual liberty, free functions, and data as well as detecting, expression, free markets, and privacy. We retain responding to, and recovering from incidents. our commitment to the promise of an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet to The Way Forward strengthen and extend our values and protect and New threats and a new era of strategic compeensure economic security for American workers tition demand a new cyber strategy that responds and companies. The future we desire will not to new realities, reduces vulnerabilities, deters come without a renewed American commitment adversaries, and safeguards opportunities for to advance our interests across cyberspace. the American people to thrive. Securing cyberspace is fundamental to our strategy and requires The Administration recognizes that the United technical advancements and administrative States is engaged in a continuous competition efficiency across the Federal Government and against strategic adversaries, rogue states, and the private sector. The Administration also terrorist and criminal networks. Russia, China, recognizes that a purely technocratic approach Iran, and North Korea all use cyberspace as a to cyberspace is insufficient to address the means to challenge the United States, its allies, nature of the new problems we confront. The and partners, often with a recklessness they would United States must also have policy choices never consider in other domains. These adverto impose costs if it hopes to deter malicious saries use cyber tools to undermine our economy cyber actors and prevent further escalation. and democracy, steal our intellectual property, 2