The rise of cybersecurity warriors?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The increasing demand for cybersecurity has been met by a global supply, namely, a rapidly growing market of private companies that offer their services worldwide. Cybersecurity firms develop both defensive (e.g. protection of own networks) and offensive innovations (e.g. development of zero days), whereby they provide operational capacities and expertise to overstrained states. Yet, there is hardly any systematic knowledge of these new cybersecurity warriors to date. Who are they, and how can we differentiate them? This contribution to the special issue seeks to give an initial overview of the coordination between public and private actors in cyberspace. I thus explore these new private security forces by mapping the emerging market for these goods and services. The analysis develops a generic typology from a newly generated data set of almost one hundred companies. As a result of this stock-taking exercise, I suggest how to theorize public-private coordination as network relationships in order to provide a number of preliminary insights into the rise of this ‘brave new industry’ and to point out critical implications for the future of private security forces.