Abstract
Cybersecurity protects citizens and society from harm perpetrated through computer networks. Its task is made ever more complex by the diversity of actors—criminals, spies, militaries, hacktivists, firms—operating in global information networks, so that cybersecurity is intimately entangled with the so-called grey zone of conflict between war and peace in the early twenty-first century. To counter cyber threats from this environment, cybersecurity is turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI) to mitigate anomalous behaviours in cyberspace. This article argues that AI algorithms create new modes and sites of cybersecurity knowledge production through hybrid assemblages of humans and nonhumans. It concludes by looking beyond ‘everyday’ cybersecurity to military and intelligence use of AI and asks what is at stake in the automation of cybersecurity.
Highlights
Discussions of ‘digital war’ quickly resolve to an understanding that global digital connectivity has disturbed our orthodox understandings of war and peace
Even if it is a step too far to label many of these activities—political activism, crime, espionage, subversion—as ‘war’ or ‘war-like’ (Levinson, this volume), it is not unreasonable to characterise the wider environment of cybersecurity as one of persistent grey-zone conflict (Corn 2019, 347–354)
The following discussion addresses the identification of cyber threats through AI and algorithmic means and demonstrates a shift from signature- to anomaly-based approaches to threat detection and mitigation
Summary
Discussions of ‘digital war’ quickly resolve to an understanding that global digital connectivity has disturbed our orthodox understandings of war and peace. For instance, suitably equipped states view ‘cyber’ as a coercive tool worth exploiting for national gain, be it in military operations, intelligence-gathering or commercial cyberespionage (Brantly 2018; Valeriano et al 2018). As most of this occurs below the level of conventional conflict, it is seen as a way of limiting conflict escalation, albeit always with the potential to generate just the opposite (Brands 2016; Schneider 2019). This brief exploration concludes by looking beyond everyday cybersecurity to military and intelligence ‘cyber’ and asks what is at stake in the automation of cybersecurity
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