[Harlow:] Russia appears to be the number-one suspect in the hacking of a Pentagon e-mail service. The attack happened about two weeks ago on an unclassified e-mail server used by 4,000 employees at the Pentagon who work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The server is still down and there's a lot of talk about who could have carried this out. I want to talk about it more and the significance of it with Robert Knake, a former White House cybersecurity director, and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Looking at this first, the U.S. military describes this as a very sophisticated, a stealth spear fishing hack. Walk us through what happened and why it is different this time, why it shows more precise capability from the hackers.
[Robert Knake, Senior Fellow, Council On Foreign Relations & Former White House Cybersecurity Director:] What we saw in this specific incident was an incredibly sophisticated set of tools that had never been seen before. Tools that allowed the attacker to get into the network, to find the information they want and to extract it in a very, very short amount of time. What we've seen is the in networks for three quarters of the year. They were able to get in, get the information they wanted and get out in a very, very short amount of time. I'm told days.
[Harlow:] Wow. A senior defense official told CNN exactly what you just said, that this hack exposes sort of a new vulnerability from what they've ever seen in the past. You are highly confident this is Russia. We don't know for sure yet. But that's what you are leaning towards. I wonder if you could take us into what retaliation looks like for something like this.
[Knake:] For something like this, I think retaliation is probably unlikely. This is the kind of
[Harlow:] Why?
[Knake:] It's what people might call tit for tat spying in the great game. This is what country adversaries like Russia and the United States did to each other in the Cold War and now it's taking place over the electronic networks. It's not the kind of thing that crosses the red lines that the president has laid out on cybersecurity. It's not economic espionage, not stealing secrets from corporate, not doing any of the things that he's laid out as requiring a response.
[Harlow:] But what it does show is that new capability and vulnerability. So aren't you just waiting for that to happen, for that to hit the line for what it called for or spark retaliation?
[Knake:] If the Russians are behind it, what would be the response if they used it against a target like critical infrastructure, if they used it to access systems, take down a power grid, disrupt communications, to mess with our financial markets? They use the capability for that and, yeah, it certainly crossed that line. In this case, I think the response is to take a hard look at how DOD markets are protected and they are some of the best protected markets in the world but in this case they were hacked and exploited.
[Harlow:] Take us behind the scenes of who comes in, then. You're saying don't focus on retaliation. The focus should be on our vulnerabilities and where the weakness was or is, frankly. Who do you bring in to solve that?
[Knake:] What they have done is they have shut down this network for ten days and that means they are going to have to rely on other networks and their capabilities which were not touched by this attack and then they are going to figure out how this happened and once they figure out how it happened they will share that information with the rest of the department of defense and the rest of the government and hopefully with the rest of our partners in the private sector. So that they can prevent this kind of attack from happening again. There is, I think, good news here, the fact that this was caught. I think that we're going to see a lot more of these incidents being caught and making news whereas in the pass we might not have known that something this sophisticated was taking place.
[Harlow:] That's a good point. Robert Knake, thank you very much.
[Knake:] Thank you.
[Harlow:] Coming up, last night's GOP debate, the most watched in primary history. I'll have the highlights for you ahead. What the candidates said and big winners and losers of the evening. That's straight ahead. Coming up as well here on the program, a jewelry heist in the south of France in the vacation home of a Formula One race car driver. We are learning the thieves may have used sleeping gas during the brazen burglary. That's next.