In the last three years, the U.S. military’s Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) has conducted 47 such “hunt forward” defensive operations across 20 countries at the invitation of those nations, U.S. Army Major General William Hartman said on Monday.
Hartman said CNMF had dispatched 43 specialists to Ukraine, which has been battling Russian cyber onslaughts amid the war there, which Russia calls a "special operation."
“Those are defense teams we send, and (they) hunt for shared adversaries, find tools and capabilities,” Hartman said.
“The demand for that only increases, and they are not all the same,” Hartman, CNMF's commander, said of the missions.
The initiative reflects a broader push by the U.S. government to improve collaboration with foreign allies on combating cyber crimes, which often cross borders. Some of the largest known ransomware criminal gangs, for instance, have targeted multiple countries, including the United States.
He said the CNMF was working closely with the top U.S. cyber body, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Both agencies had collaborated on thwarting potential attacks against three U.S. federal agencies by foreign adversaries, said Eric Goldstein, CISA’s executive assistant director.
"We notified the agencies, gave them guidance, and kicked off incident response. Simultaneously, we gathered all the information on the adversary infrastructure and shared it with CNMF," he said. Goldstein and Hartman declined to offer further details on the incidents.