Thanks for the question.
Cyber is an emerging domain, and I think all countries are trying to figure out the best methodology for dealing with it. The United States is almost pretty much, I don't want to say alone, but singular among the allies in having a stand-alone cybercommand as such militarily. They structured themselves in quite a specific way. Almost all of the other countries and partners that we deal with have a variety of public safety or homeland security kinds of leads, working with their foreign ministries and working with their defence institutions.
I think the question is, how can you best posture your country to be able to defend and respond to cyberattacks?There are a lot of different ways of doing it. At the moment I think we've determined that cyberincidents...if you put a strictly military lens on everything that happens in cyber, you will be looking at a strictly military response. The fact is, at the moment most cyberincidents are designed to spy; they're designed to disrupt; they're designed to do all sorts of things. Understanding the intent behind them, and then determining the best instrument of government to respond to that is extremely important.
At the moment we feel that what we have through the Canadian Forces in terms of identifying where the threats are coming from, protecting our systems, being able to provide that expertise to the whole of government to be able to mitigate...working with close partners.... The United States is a key partner here when it comes to things like critical infrastructure in cyber, and NORAD even looks at cyber now. That's part of how we're dealing with it.
I don't think anybody has found the perfect method for it.