Cyber Conflict Research Articles

ВЗАЄМОЗВ'ЯЗОК СОЦІАЛЬНИХ УМОВ ЖИТТЄДІЯЛЬНОСТІ ІЗ СТУПЕНЕМ ПРОЯВУ КІБЕР-АДИКЦІЙ

The whole world today is rapidly following the path of digitalization of society, cyberspace is becoming a new sphere of reality for the majority of the population. Despite all the advantages of interactive technologies and the speed of obtaining the necessary information due to the prevalence of the Internet. New problematic issues also arise. Almost 8% of the world's population has been already addicted to the Internet, but questions about the nosology, etiology of cyber addictions and their treatment and prevention still remain unresolved. The aim of this study was to identify the impact of social living conditions on the severity of cyber addictions. The following research methods were used: bibliographic and historical analysis of theoretical heritage, psychodiagnostic testing: Test-questionnaire for detecting cyber addiction (TQC) and semi-structured interview of respondents to clarify social living conditions as well as mathematical and statistical methods for data analysis (data processing was done using the program "Microsoft Excel", "SPSS 26.0 for Windows XP"). The study sample consisted of 559 people, including 408 who had certain types of cyber addictions and 151 people who agreed to join the control group (relatively healthy). The study was conducted in accordance with the principles of bioethics and deontology. It was found that the most typical addictions for boys are computer addiction, Internet addiction, game addiction and gadget addiction; more typical addictions for girls are cybercommunication addiction and selfie. In correlation analysis (according to Pearson and Tau-b Kendall) of relationship between the influence of social living conditions on the severity of cyber addictions it was found that according to the results of both correlation matrices the links were not revealed between cyber addictions and educational institutions in which our respondents studied; but at the same time a direct relationship was found between computer addiction, Internet addiction, game addiction and cyber-communication addiction with the academic success of cyber-addicts. Such a type of cyber addiction as selfie has an inverse relationship with the material wealth of the family. When analyzing the results obtained by Pearson's correlation analysis, it can be argued that the manifestations of all types of cyber addictions have a medium direct connection with conflicts with parents, a weak direct connection between cyber addictions and conflicts with peers.

International trade and cyber conflict: Decomposing the effect of trade on state-sponsored cyber attacks

A state’s decision to engage in cyber operations has important implications for its trade. Successful cyber espionage could yield valuable trade secrets that could boost domestic production and spur economic growth. On the other hand, uncovered cyber operations could invite devastating sanctions that retard economic development. In spite of this, the nexus between trade and cyber attacks has received little attention in the literature. In this article, I explore how a state’s trade relations affect its propensity to engage in cyber attacks. I develop a theoretical framework that links the composition of a state’s trade to its deficit in proprietary information relative to other states. I decompose trade into its inter- and intra-industry components and show that while inter-industry trade is associated with higher incidence of state-sponsored cyber attacks, intra-industry trade has the opposite effect. I also show that these effects are non-monotonic, varying by the share of inter- or intra-industry trade in total trade. The results also show that states that have a heavy concentration of high-tech industries such as aerospace, computers, and pharmaceuticals have a higher propensity to engage in cyber espionage operations. These results are robust to a variety of controls and specifications.

The strategic surprise of Russian information operations on social media in 2016 in the United States: mapping a blind spot

ABSTRACT Despite many years of preparation for cyber conflict against US critical infrastructure and military forces, the US government and cybersecurity industry were unprepared for Russian information operations targeting the 2016 US presidential election. While the Russian campaign had many components, this article focuses specifically on the covert use of social media accounts and online properties impersonating Americans for the purpose of manipulation. This article addresses the strategic blind spot around Russian information operations and the technocentric Western approach to cybersecurity that led to it. The authors explore three fields contributing essential insights to the understanding of information operations on social media: cyber conflict and cybersecurity studies, Internet and Society studies, and the Information Controls literature within human rights scholarship. Each conceptualizes cyberspace differently, but a theory of information operations on social media will bridge conceptual gaps. The article concludes that despite this initial blind spot, great tactical progress in addressing information operations on social media has been made by the US government and large US social media platforms since the 2017 ‘reckoning’. A more robust and foundational theory of information operations on social media remains to be built, integrating and synthesizing concepts from the three fields described in this article. 1

Cyber Conflict and the Thresholds of War

Cyberspace has revolutionized the way in which states engage in conflict with one another. While it is widely accepted that international law applies to cyberspace, there remains the question of whether cyberspace is truly novel and distinctive in its effects to the extent that our existing legal thresholds for war have become outdated. Namely, this chapter defines the “thresholds of war” as use of force, armed attack, and armed conflict. Through an analysis of the novelty of cyber conflict, this chapter seeks to make two contributions. First, to demonstrate that cyber conflict can be understood not only through its kinetic consequences, but also through a variety of mass-scale and devastating effects that lie below the thresholds of war as articulated through the decades. Second, that these thresholds of war are outdated and in need of recalibration to properly capture actions that legitimate and illegitimate in cyberspace. This chapter argues that the current international legal order is at danger of creating a lawless cyberspace, where states engage in offensive cyberspace behavior based on an assumption that any effects below the thresholds of war are permissible. Redrawing the line between the permissible and impermissible in cyberspace is of utmost importance to tackle this concern.

Cyber conflict vs. Cyber Command: hidden dangers in the American military solution to a large-scale intelligence problem

ABSTRACT Is cyber conflict more like war, intelligence, or something else? The stakes of this debate are not simply conceptual but institutional. United States Cyber Command emerged from the American intelligence community, but it has strong legal and organizational imperatives to explain its operations in military terms. Even though cyber operations are essentially a digital manifestation of classic intelligence practice, or secret statecraft, CYBERCOM is emphatically not an intelligence organization. This contradiction between the nature of the problem and the bureaucratic solution has the potential to complicate both intelligence and cybersecurity.

The function of positive face threatening acts baldly on-record without redressive action in household and cyberconflict: a pragmatic study

Humans as social beings cannot be free from conflict. Speech is one of the causes of conflict. This study discusses the function of Positive Face Threatening Acts on-record baldly without redressive action on household conflicts in a popular psychology book and cyber conflicts between netizens on Facebook. The method used in this research was descriptive qualitative method. The results showed that there were two main functions of the use of Positive Face Threatening Acts baldly on-record without redressive action in household conflicts taken from dialogues in a popular psychology book and cyber conflicts between netizens on Facebook comments, namely if it is used as a utterance then it functions to trigger conflict (PK) and if it is used as a response it serves to maintain FTA/Face/conflict (MK). Whatever the problems or conflicts background that occur both in the household and in the cyber world, conflicts can arise as a result of utterances and also with utterances these conflicts can be resolved or maintained. It depends on the participants involved in the conflict. In other words, utterances can be used either to threaten or defend one's self-esteem/face.

A Bizarre Pair: Counterinsurgency Lessons for Cyber Conflict

The lessons of counterinsurgency have deeper implications for cyber conflict than previous research has identified. Two decades of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan provide insights into the cyber strategy of defending forward including treating major cybersecurity and technology companies as host-nation partners and focusing on winning the hearts and minds of global netizens.

A tale of two cybers - how threat reporting by cybersecurity firms systematically underrepresents threats to civil society

ABSTRACT Public and academic knowledge of cyber conflict relies heavily on data from commercial threat reporting. There are reasons to be concerned that these data provide a distorted view of cyber threat activity. Commercial cybersecurity firms only focus on a subset of the universe of threats, and they only report publicly on a subset of the subset. High end threats to high-profile victims are prioritized in commercial reporting while threats to civil society organizations, which lack the resources to pay for high-end cyber defense, tend to be neglected or entirely bracketed. This selection bias not only hampers scholarship on cybersecurity but also has concerning consequences for democracy. We present and analyze an original dataset of available public reporting by the private sector together with independent research centers. We also present three case studies tracing reporting patterns on a cyber operation targeting civil society. Our findings confirm the neglect of civil society threats, supporting the hypothesis that commercial interests of firms will produce a systematic bias in reporting, which functions as much as advertising as intelligence. The result is a truncated sample of cyber conflict that underrepresents civil society targeting and distorts academic debate as well as public policy.

Insurance definitions of cyber war

Definitions of war found in cyber insurance policies provide a novel window into the concept of cyber war. Mediated by market forces, changes in policy wording reflect shifting expectations surrounding technology and military strategy. Legal cases contesting war clauses probe state-formulated narratives around war and offensive cyber operations. In a recent legal case, an insurer refused to pay a property insurance claim by arguing the cause of the claim—the NotPetya cyberattack—constitutes a hostile or warlike action. To understand the implications, we build a corpus of 56 cyber insurance policies. Longitudinal analysis reveals some specialist cyber insurance providers introduced policies without war clauses until as late as 2012. Recent years have seen war exclusions weakened as cyber insurance policies affirmatively cover “cyber terrorism”. However, these clauses provide few explicit definitions, rather they prompt a legal discourse in which evidence is presented and subjected to formal reasoning. Going forward, war clauses will evolve so insurers can better quantify and control the costs resulting from offensive cyber operations. This pushes insurers to affirmatively describe the circumstances in which cyber conflict is uninsurable.

Professional Wargaming: A Flawed but Useful Tool

Rationale for the Article. Professional wargames have long been an integral part of the tool set used by the military. The literature includes many examples of wargames that have been successful in terms of training, military education, procurement, operational analysis and planning for war. However, retrospective examination demonstrates that many of these professional wargames also had major errors in them and by implication current games about future confrontations are similarly flawed. Nevertheless, the academic evidence is clear that such games are still invaluable tools. Methodology. Ten years of research into the development of wargames undertaken by the History of Wargaming Project has analysed and made generally available more professional wargames than ever before. Retrospective examination of a sample of these declassified games, from the British War Office Rules (1896) to more recent games about the Ukraine, shows significant errors. Value. Demonstrating that professional games had errors in the past opens challenges the overconfidence in the predictive capacity of games. It also raises the possibility for future research to identify game design bias and to develop better games in the future. Understanding the value of better games, even with their inherent issues, raise the possibility of better preparing decision makers for the future. Notes. The words wargame and game are used interchangeably in this article. Whilst the techniques used in professional gaming evolved from modelling the battlefield, modern professional gaming is increasingly focussed on other situations that are not war, such as state level confrontations, trade wars, politics, cyber conflict, banking crisis etc. Using the term wargame seems inappropriate when for example, gaming a shipping dispute. All the games referred to this article, unless otherwise noted, are professional wargames, used by military, government, public sector bodies and other parties directly involved in real world issues. The prefix professional has been omitted for brevity in most places.

The changing role of multilateral forums in regulating armed conflict in the digital age

AbstractThis article examines a subset of multilateral forums dealing with security problems posed by digital technologies, such as cyber warfare, cyber crime and lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).1 It identifies structural issues that make it difficult for multilateral forums to discuss fast-moving digital issues and respond in time with the required norms and policy measures. Based on this problem analysis, and the recent experience of regulating cyber conflict and LAWS through Groups of Governmental Experts, the article proposes a schema for multilateral governance of digital technologies in armed conflict. The schema includes a heuristic for understanding human–machine interaction in order to operationalize accountability with international humanitarian law principles and international law applicable to armed conflict in the digital age. The article concludes with specific suggestions for advancing work in multilateral forums dealing with cyber weapons and lethal autonomy.

Using Mini-Games to Teach Cyber Issues to Social Science Students

This essay outlines a set of mini-games designed to more effectively allow political science instructors, particularly in International Relations, teach basic principles and concepts associated with digital insecurity and cyber conflict. This topic, increasingly significant in IR syllabi in recent years, is in many cases considered with trepidation or uncertainty about the significance of different subjects within that might be covered. As a result, instructors often fall back on discussion of paradigm examples and fail to teach the underlying principles of function and logical design that give students insight into the security dynamics of the digital domain. Without such instruction, students in political science are less likely to act on interest in digital issues or science, technology and society topics more broadly. The games suggested herein are resources aimed at easing the challenge of providing such instruction and are accompanied by elaboration on student responses from three years of their use. These mini-games are extremely successful and, more importantly, simple and versatile enough that their incorporation in both introductory and intermediate IR syllabi is easy.

Mapping the Known Unknowns of Cybersecurity Education: A Review of Syllabi on Cyber Conflict and Security

Colleges and universities continue to expand their curricula to include cybersecurity as an explicit course of study in political science. But what is taught in a course on cybersecurity? Are syllabi deep dives into technology, broad romps through contemporary policy debates, or do they reflect a more varied disposition? Studying the syllabi of an area of study, especially one as immature at cybersecurity, can reveal a great deal about the assumptions and practices of scholars. This paper reviews two dozen syllabi to identify key literature in the field, generate an overview of best practices on teaching cyber conflict across academic institutions, help identify potential gaps in current course offerings, and assist faculty in identifying core concepts and readings. We found that few courses use the same literature, such that there is tremendous intellectual and disciplinary diversity in course content. Of the top 13 readings across the surveyed syllabi, all but two were published in the last seven years. The state of play in cybersecurity education is to emphasize recent scholarship, largely found outside the top-tier journals in political science and related disciplines. Highlighting these findings, this paper explores some additional materials and resources which can complement a still sparse canon of cybersecurity literature.

Neurocognitive hacking A new capability in cyber conflict?

This article presents a discussion of neurocognitive hacking and its potential for use at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of cyber conflict. Neurocognitive hacking refers to the ability to activate specific neural areas of the brain, via subliminal or supraliminal stimuli, to shape the behavioral outcomes of an adversary. Research suggests that awareness of mortality-related stimuli has neural correlates in the right amygdala and left anterior cingulate cortex and mediates negative behavior toward out-group members, including unconscious discriminatory behavior. Given its in-group/out-group dynamic, the phenomenon could be exploited for use in information operations toward target populations, specifically ones that are multiethnic, multicultural, or multireligious. Although development of the theoretical framework behind neurocognitive hacking is ongoing, mortality-related stimuli are proposed to activate one's unconscious vigilance system to further evaluate the locus and viability of the suspect stimuli. Research suggests that the subsequent discriminatory affective reactions directed toward out-group members are representative of automatic heuristics evolved to protect the organism in the event a stimulus represents a more serious threat to survival. Therefore, presenting mortality-related stimuli over computer networks to targeted audiences may facilitate the ingestion of tailored propaganda or shaping of specific behavioral outcomes within a population, including sowing division in a target community or weakening support for a specific political regime.

Information and communication technology and cyber conflict: rethinking the role of the United Nations in world peace

Information and communication technology and cyber conflict: rethinking the role of the United Nations in world peace

Just Short of Cyberwar: A Focus on Jus Ad Vim to Inform an Ethical Framework for Cyberspace

This article focuses on the concept of jus ad vim (just short of war) to inform an ethical framework for cyber conflict. This proposed framework is founded on five separate concepts pulled from the literature: intentional cyberharm, preventative force, punctuated deterrence, cyber sovereignty, and international response.

Cyber conflict or democracy “hacked”? How cyber operations enhance information warfare

Abstract Are cyber-enabled information warfare (IW) campaigns uniquely threatening when compared with traditional influence operations undertaken by state actors? Or is the recent “hacking” of Western democracies simply old wine in new—but fundamentally similar—bottles? This article draws on classical theories of democratic functionality from the political science and communications studies fields to deconstruct the aims and effects of cyber-enabled IW. I describe democracies as information systems wherein the moderating functions of democratic discourse and policy deliberation rely on robust mechanisms for asserting the credibility, origination, and quality of information. Whereas the institutions of democracy are often compromised in ways that force failures of the system’s moderating dynamics, influence operations in the digital age act to subvert the traditional mechanisms of democratic functionality in new ways. Sophisticated digital age information operations create a multifaceted attribution challenge to the target state that amounts to unprecedented uncertainty about the nature and scope of the threat. However, the promise of cyber-enabled IW capabilities emerges more from the rewiring of modern democratic information environments around new media platforms than it does from the cyber conflict faculties of state actors. Rather, cyber operations act as an adjunct modifier of IW abilities that allow belligerent governments to secure new sources of private information, to divert attention from other pillars of IW campaigns, to compromise the capabilities of domestic counterintelligence assets and to tacitly coerce important members of society.

Information and Communication Technology and Cyber Conflict: Rethinking the Role of the United Nations in World Peace

The revolution in information and communication technology (ICT) has changed virtually all spheres of life, including the means and methods of warfare. Most aspects of life are now tied to technology, from health to governance. The military has not been left out. Some countries' military organisations now have cyber warfare units. The United Nations (UN), established to promote global peace, now finds it difficult to cope with this new emerging dimension of warfare. It is in this context that the study examines ICT and cyber conflict with a focus on rethinking the role of the United Nations in world peace. The study finds that even though the UN has been applying the laws of armed conflict and some suggested norms to address the possible danger of cyber conflict, they seem not to be sufficient which can hamper state relations and threaten the fragile stability of the international system.

Development of the interacting agents behavior scenario in the cyber security system

The results of modeling and analysis of scenarios of the behavior of interacting agents in conditions of cyber conflict are presented. General approaches to the development of a scenario of the behavior of antagonistic agents are presented. The definition of the scenario is given and the factors determining the scenario of behavior are highlighted. The given scenarios are determined by such factors as the ratio of the capabilities of the attacking and the defending sides, the presence or absence of information exchange between security agents, and the time of switching to a new attack vector. The value of the time of switching to a new attack vector is found, at which the interaction is more stable. This indicates that the reaction of the defense side should not be purely reactive, and the “wait and see” strategy is not always the best. Modeling and analysis of the results were carried out in the conditions of information exchange between agents of the protection system and in the absence of such an exchange. The advantages and disadvantages of this behavior are noted. It is shown that when changing the time of switching to a new attack vector, not only the financial indicators of the activity of the participants in cyber conflict change, but also the nature of the interaction. The value of the time of switching to a new attack vector was found, in which the interaction is more stable, which suggests that the reaction of the defense side should not be purely reactive, and the “wait and see” strategy is not always the best. It is shown how the proposed approach can be used to justify the choice of a strategy for agent behavior in security systems, as well as for economic assessments of countermeasures and their deterrent effect on attackers. The proposed scenarios can be considered as a useful tool for assessing investments in the security of the business process circuit by decision makers

Contested public attributions of cyber incidents and the role of academia

ABSTRACTPublic attributions of cyber incidents by governments and private industry have become prevalent in recent years. This article argues that they display a skewed version of cyber conflict for several operational and structural reasons, including political, commercial, and legal constraints. In addition, public attribution of cyber incidents takes place in a heavily contested information environment, creating fractured narratives of a shared past. The article uses three cyber incidents (Sony Pictures, DNC, and NotPetya) to show how actors cope with this contested information environment and proposes a changed role of academia to address some of the problems that emerge. To become competent in contesting public attribution discourses, universities would have to work more across physical, disciplinary, and academic boundaries. The main implications for democracies are to be more transparent about how attribution is performed, enable other civilian actors to study cyber conflict, and thereby broaden the discourse on cybersecurity politics.