Category: Cyber

Cyber Deterrence Is Dead: Long Live Cyber Deterrence!

Post author By Max Smeets
Post date 02/03/2020
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*Image courtesy of Jacob Osborne/DVIDS.*

This article was originally published by the Council on Foreign Relations on 18 February 2020.

Born in the 1990s, the thinking on cyber deterrence was nurtured by the U.S. Department of Defense in numerous war-gaming exercises. Hitting puberty in the aftermath of the distributed denial-of-service campaign against Estonia in 2007, cyber deterrence matured after Stuxnet and received peak attention from policymakers and academics from 2013 to 2016 during the golden age of ‘cyberwar’ scholarship. From 2016 onward, the interest in cyber deterrence started to fade to the extent that it is now intentionally neglected. The figure below captures this short life cycle by quantitatively visualizing the number of articles, book chapters, and research reports written on ‘cyber deterrence’ and ‘cyberdeterrence’ between January 1990 and January 2020.

Tags United States of America, Security research, Cybersecurity, Deterrence

Cyber

Expanding Disclosure Policy to Drive Better Cybersecurity

Post author By Rob Knake
Post date 15/11/2019
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This article was originally published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on 16 October 2019.

Introduction

Threats to national and economic security emanating from cyberspace are all too real, but public disclosure of incidents of the theft of intellectual property (IP) is exceedingly rare. Former National Security Agency Director and the first Commander of Cyber Command Keith Alexander has labeled China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property through cyber means “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” Few experts in the field dispute that conclusion. In November 2015, National Counterintelligence Executive William Evanina estimated that cyber-enabled economic espionage cost the U.S. economy $400 billion per year, with 90 percent of the theft originating in China.

Tags United States of America, Cybersecurity, Intellectual Property, National law

Cyber CSS Blog

Contested Public Attributions of Cyber Incidents and the Role of Academia

Post author By Florian J. Egloff
Post date 21/10/2019
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*Image courtesy of Saksham Gangwar/Unsplash*

In a recent article in Contemporary Security Policy, Florian J. Egloff reflects on the contested nature of public attributions of cyber incidents and what role academia could take up.

In the last five years, public attribution of cyber incidents has gone from an incredibly rare event to a regular occurrence. Just in October 2018, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre publicized its assessment of cyber activities conducted by the Russian military intelligence service (also known by its old acronym, the GRU). Clearly, publicizing activities that other political actors like to keep secret is a political act – but what kind of political act is it and what happens when a government publicly attributes?

Tags Cybersecurity, Cyber-Attack

Cyber CSS Blog

National Cybersecurity Organizations, Main Bodies and Responsibilities: Netherlands

Post author By the Center for Security Studies
Post date 17/10/2019
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This week’s featured graphics outline how cybersecurity responsibilities are shared among governmental organizations in the Netherlands. For more information on national cybersecurity strategies and cybersecurity challenges in Italy, as well as in Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy and Switzerland, read Marie Baezner and Sean Cordey’s CSS cyber defense report here.