The White House just deputized private hackers to fight foreign cybercrime.
President Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum on Thursday directing the National Coordination Center, part of the Homeland Security Task Force, to build a program letting private security firms run cyber operations against foreign criminal groups. The Justice and Homeland Security departments will provide oversight. A fact sheet attached to the memo lists ransomware, sextortion, phishing, financial fraud, and impersonation scams as fair targets. Firms would be authorized to run what the memo calls "Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations" against so-called transnational criminal organizations - foreign groups that hack Americans but are not controlled by a foreign government.
This formalizes, with federal blessing, something security researchers have quietly attempted for years: probing and disrupting criminal infrastructure from the outside. Turning that into sanctioned policy changes the legal and diplomatic stakes, since a private contractor's server-side intrusion now carries the government's name. The memo leaves the actual rules of engagement - who approves a target, what counts as proportionate, how mistakes get handled - to a program that does not exist yet.
It answers who gets to hack back. It does not yet say what happens when a contractor's operation lands in the wrong network.