The Scam Farms Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025 (H.R. 4988) has reignited debate around offensive cyber operations. The bill would let the President authorize the private sector to go after cybercriminals and criminal enterprises, even foreign-backed ones, that threaten U.S. security and economy.

At the same time, major industry players are exploring disruption units to take down active attacker infrastructure. No matter the strategy, one fact is certain: defense starts with knowing your vulnerabilities.

The Bill: Offensive Security on the Policy Agenda

H.R. 4988, introduced on August 15, 2025, would empower the President to enlist private actors in pursuing foreign cybercriminal enterprises through letters of marque. This is an explicit push toward offensive security as a deterrence strategy.

The Industry Push: Exploitation Infrastructure (EI) and Disruption

Industry and government have already demonstrated how coordinated disruption of attacker infrastructure can significantly curb cybercriminal capabilities. Several recent operations offer concrete examples:

• Rapper Bot Disruption (“Operation PowerOff”): In August 2025, the Department of Justice (DOJ), with technical support from Amazon Web Services, Google, Cloudflare, PayPal, and others, dismantled one of the most powerful DDoS-for-hire botnets ever. The botnet, known as RapperBot, had launched over 370,000 attacks using tens of thousands of compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
• Lumma Malware Takedown: In May 2025, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), DOJ, Europol, Japan’s Cybercrime Control Center, Cloudflare, and others succeeded in dismantling Lumma’s C2 infrastructure. Their malware had infected nearly 394,000 Windows computers with malware and stole passwords, credit cards, bank accounts, and other sensitive information that were used by hundreds of cyber threat actors.

• Qakbot Malware Dismantling (“Operation Duck Hunt”): In 2023, the FBI, working with international partners in Europe, disabled the Qakbot botnet by seizing more than 50 servers and remotely removing malware from over 700,000 infected machines. The operation also recovered $8.6 million in cryptocurrency.
• “Endgame” Botnet Disruption: A multi-year, multinational effort known as Operation Endgame targeted several malware families, including IcedID, Trickbot, Bumblebee, and Pikabot. The operation resulted in arrests, the seizure of malicious domains, and the dismantling of infrastructure across multiple countries.

These cases illustrate how industry, even without formal new legislation, has already stepped up through collaboration with law enforcement to disable exploitation infrastructure. These operations reflect a shared shift in the security ecosystem: infrastructure disruption is increasingly seen as essential to degrading adversary campaigns, not just fixing vulnerabilities.

Safety and Responsibility Concerns

While offensive security holds promise, it also brings serious risks:

• Escalation and blowback: Attacking adversary infrastructure could trigger retaliation, especially when state-linked actors are involved.
• Attribution challenges: Misidentifying the source of an exploit or adversary infrastructure can lead to actions against the wrong party. This could result in political, reputational, and legal fallout.
• Collateral impact: Infrastructure used by attackers may also host or be hidden inside of legitimate services or data. Taking it down without precision risks harming bystanders.
• Private sector authority: Empowering companies to act offensively raises fundamental questions. Who sets the rules of engagement? Who ensures accountability?

The Common Denominator: Knowing Vulnerabilities

Whether the goal is to disable adversary infrastructure or to strengthen your own systems, the process begins with knowing the flaws.

• Offensive operations require precise identification of weaknesses in target systems in order to act effectively and safely.
• Defensive operations require the same level of analysis to eliminate exploitable paths before attackers can use them.

In both cases, accurate vulnerability discovery is the precondition for any responsible security action. Without it, you cannot act with precision or confidence.

From Principle to Practice

There are many ways organizations pursue this kind of precision. Some rely on advanced threat intelligence feeds, others on red teaming or large-scale penetration testing. Increasingly, teams are also looking at binary analysis, which can reveal weaknesses in applications, firmware, and third-party components even when source code is not available.

This approach matters because it goes beyond broad vulnerability scanning and instead provides actionable, validated findings. It gives defenders a way to close exploitable gaps before adversaries reach them, and offers operators a foundation of confidence when planning disruption or countermeasures. Tools like BinLens put this analysis into practice, but they are part of a wider trend toward deeper, more trustworthy methods of vulnerability discovery.

Precision and Confidence

Offensive operations hinge on reliable intelligence. A faulty finding can derail a mission or cause unintended consequences. Similarly, defenders cannot afford to waste cycles chasing noise. High-accuracy vulnerability intelligence with low false positives provides a foundation both sides can trust before taking action.

Tracing execution paths, exposing unsafe functions, and identifying cryptographic or memory-handling flaws shows not just where weaknesses exist but how they could be used. This level of precision supports practical exploit design for operators and effective remediation for defenders.

Trust and Verification

Security teams cannot afford to act on noisy or incomplete findings. Traditional static analysis tools are helpful, but they often flag issues that are not truly exploitable or miss vulnerabilities that only appear during dynamic analysis.

Advanced methods such as symbolic execution take a different approach. By simulating possible execution paths in a binary and analyzing how inputs flow through the code, they can reliably detect exploitable flaws that static scanners often miss. These include memory corruption risks like overflows and invalid frees, unsafe control flow conditions that let execution move outside intended bounds, and dangerous read/write behaviors that expose or alter data beyond safe limits.

When combined with evidence such as control flow traces and proof-of-concept inputs, the results provide findings that teams can validate and act on with confidence. This kind of approach is central to how BinLens operates, applying symbolic execution at scale to give organizations analysis they can trust for both defensive and coordinated security efforts.

Know Your Binary Vulnerabilities with BinLens

To act with precision in security, organizations need visibility into the flaws hidden inside their code and supply chain. BinLens provides that visibility through advanced automated binary analysis. Proactive security efforts, whether they focus on disrupting adversary infrastructure or on defending enterprise systems, all begin with the same requirement: understanding where the vulnerabilities are.

BinLens delivers this foundation by analyzing software binaries directly, without source code, and surfacing exploitable weaknesses before attackers can take advantage of them. With BinLens, organizations can see the weaknesses hidden inside applications, firmware, and third-party components. This insight makes it possible to cut down exploitable risk, move faster during incidents, and strengthen participation in larger security efforts.

Provide the precision offensive actions demand

Offensive operations hinge on confidence. A faulty finding can derail a mission or create unintended consequences. BinLens delivers high-accuracy vulnerability intelligence with low false positives, giving operators a foundation they can trust before taking action. It removes uncertainty from the earliest stage of offensive planning.

Map viable attack paths for operational use

Beyond knowing that a weakness exists, operators need to understand how that weakness can be turned into access or disruption. BinLens traces execution paths, highlights unsafe functions, and identifies misuse of cryptography or memory handling. This mapping shows where and how control can realistically be gained, helping teams design exploits and effects that are practical, targeted, and mission-aligned.

Enable defenders to close doors before adversaries exploit them

BinLens detects memory-safety issues, unsafe input handling, weak cryptography, and other vulnerabilities across applications, device firmware, and third-party binaries. It produces prioritized findings with control flow paths and call stacks that development teams can use during remediation.

Strengthen supply chain resilience

In both offense and defense, closed-source and vendor-supplied binaries present blind spots. BinLens inspects these binaries at scale, uncovering flaws and anomalies that support better procurement, deployment, and patching decisions.

The Path Forward

The conversation around offensive security is accelerating, from policy proposals like H.R. 4988 to industry-led disruption initiatives. What unites these discussions is a recognition that the status quo will not hold. Defenders and operators alike will need tools and methods that go deeper, scale further, and produce intelligence that can stand up to scrutiny.

The future of cybersecurity will depend on trustworthy insight. Whether the focus is defense, coordinated disruption, or government-authorized operations, the organizations best prepared for what comes next will be those who build on accurate, validated intelligence.