The Weaponization of Dogs on the Internet

In 1993, Pete Steiner published the New Yorker’s most reproduced cartoon of all time: A mutt on a computer commenting to a fellow hound, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

At the time, Steiner’s cartoon captured an amusing point about the early days of going online, and how hard it was to figure out who was really who. Twenty-seven years later, those dogs are long-dead (because dog years), yet the cartoon is truer than ever.

If anything, the problem has gotten worse. In 2020, “dogs on the internet” are being actively weaponized. Identity is the most commonly exploited attack vector used to breach systems and commit cybercrimes. A report published in 2019 showed that more than 80 percent of breaches could be traced to some sort of compromised digital identity. More recently, dogs on the internet have been exploited by foreign adversaries to interfere in our democracy through social media manipulation.

There is a reason why we are still struggling with this issue 27 years later: It’s a very hard problem to solve. But we are getting closer to some useful answers and, with some timely investments in digital identity infrastructure, we can make a dent in the problem.

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As the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) pointed out in a 2017 publication:

Digital identity presents a technical challenge because this process often involves proofing individuals over an open network, and always involves the authentication of individual subjects over an open network …. The processes and technologies to establish and use digital identities offer multiple opportunities for impersonation and other attacks.

The problem has only been exacerbated by recent events. As the United States shifts to social distancing because of the coronavirus, the challenges with dogs on the internet are taking on new, more complex dimensions:

• The White House has ordered a partial shutdown of citizen-facing government services—focusing on services that “cannot be performed remotely or that require in-person interactions.”
• The Treasury Department, the Small Business Administration (SBA) and other agencies are scrambling to figure out how to validate the identities of citizens and small business owners who are eligible for new benefits under the CARES Act, as are firms that participate as lending partners with the SBA. This is important not only for delivering much-needed dollars to American citizens in a timely fashion but also to stop fraudsters who are already thinking of novel ways to steal this money.
• Outside of the government, criminals are racing to take advantage of the coronavirus chaos by launching millions of phishing and identity fraud attacks to trick Americans into giving up their logins and personal information online.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Indeed, most of our peers—such as Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the European Union—do not have the same problems (at least not to the same degree as we do). As a March 24 European Commission announcement boasted:

Thanks to the “trust” enablers eID and … the eIDAS regulation, citizens do not need to leave their homes to interact with public administrations, they do not have to meet face-to-face to sign or even mail documents. In times of crisis, this is another way to achieve social distancing.

Why is the U.S. so far behind? While our international peers have invested in digital identity solutions, our federal and state governments have stayed stubbornly rooted to paper and plastic credentials.

In the government’s absence, industry has tried to fill the gap. They have built products such as knowledge-based verification (KBV) as an alternative to government-verified identity. But KBV can get you only so far—and today attackers often know the answers to the questions in KBV quizzes, just as they know the last four digits of your Social Security number. As attackers have caught up with these solutions—and identity fraud has risen—it has become clear that there is no substitute for the unique role that government plays as the authoritative source conferring legal identity.

The government’s unique role in identity verification arises because it has proved to be in the best position to address our challenges and make identity better. Not by issuing a national ID but by allowing consumers to request the government to stand behind the paper and plastic credentials it already issues in the physical world.

As Congress and the Trump administration prepare to consider a fourth coronavirus stimulus bill, they should recognize that most of the economy has shifted to a digital basis and invest in foundational building blocks of digital infrastructure. Digital identity is one such building block.

Where should the government focus? Echoing recommendations from the Better Identity Coalition, we offer three suggestions.

First, the government should establish a Federal Digital Identity Task Force (with sufficient funding) assigned to craft and implement a government-wide approach to digital identity. Today, some agencies dabble in digital identity solutions—either for supporting their own online services or for providing limited data-validation tools for the private sector—but there is no coordinated approach. What is needed is leadership, a government-wide approach for agencies to stand up new privacy-enhanced identity-validation services rooted in consumer consent, along with seed money (we estimate th

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