Alessandra Nisch
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of ...

President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.

Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction

Cybersecurity

The Strategic Competition to Shape Cyberspace

The Strategic Competition to Shape Cyberspace

The U.S. strategy to positively shape the international community to favor a democratic and accessible Internet requires a sustained, long-term commitment. Practiced behaviors, precedents, dialogue, and agreements will set expectations and reinforce norms over time. Washington must use a comprehensive, whole-of-government effort using various approaches and options to shift the environment away from China and Russia’s repressive vision of cyberspace. Authoritarian regimes will continue to push for norms and governance structure in cyberspace, favoring an illiberal model that threatens the U.S. vision of a free and open domain. The United States can take an active role in countering this authoritarian vision.

Applying Behavioral Economics to Improve Cyberspace Strategy

Applying Behavioral Economics to Improve Cyberspace Strategy

Addressing cybersecurity through an economic lens highlights the impact of market failures—information asymmetries and misaligned incentives. Some entities fail to invest in adequate security controls because they do not incur the full costs associated with a security incident. The current public and private divide creates an environment where society shoulders most of the risk of cyber-insecurity. To keep pace with relevance, all organizations, including those beyond critical infrastructure sectors, must be able to share information and respond to cyber risk in as close to real-time as possible.

Hype or Hoax: Are Russian Cyber Capabilities Robust Enough to Cripple Ukraine?

Hype or Hoax: Are Russian Cyber Capabilities Robust Enough to Cripple Ukraine?

First, by analyzing Russia’s past success in cyber and electronic warfare, this essay examines how Putin developed his assumption that Russian cyber operations would overwhelm Ukrainian cyber security measures. Second, it explores how these assumptions contributed to complacency and failure in the war in Ukraine. Finally, the essay discusses how Russia’s failures in Ukraine will shape the future of cyber and electronic warfare.

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

In Bitskrieg, John Arquilla distills much from his three decades of advocacy about networked warfare into a compact volume accessible to a wide audience. He displays a continuing ability to produce provocative arguments and engaging books. The tenets of Bitskrieg are consistent with many of Arquilla’s previous writings. These include the point that networked warfare or netwar encompasses cyber conflict but extends beyond it.

#Reviewing The Hype Machine

#Reviewing The Hype Machine

Aral’s seminal book provides two fundamental arguments: first, social media promised and still promises economic, political, and social uplift for people; it can also cause perils, such as external election influence, financial manipulation, privacy issues, spreading of fake news, and so forth. The author also argues that left unchecked, social media can bring disharmony and destruction to a country's economic, political, and social structures. Therefore, he opines that to fully utilise the potential of social media platforms and avoid their drawbacks, there needs to be a rigorous scientific understanding of social media and knowledge of its nuances to eradicate the unscientific hysteria around social media.

Social Engineering as a Threat to Societies: The Cambridge Analytica Case

Social Engineering as a Threat to Societies: The Cambridge Analytica Case

The key to counteracting social engineering is awareness since social engineers are targeting our lack of cognition, our ignorance, and our fundamental biases. In a cybersecurity context, it’s not as easy to mitigate social engineering as it is to mitigate software and hardware threats. On the software side, we can purchase intrusion detection systems, firewalls, antivirus programs, and other solutions to maintain perimeter security. Attackers will certainly break through at one point or another, but strong cybersecurity products and techniques are readily available. When it comes to social engineering, we can’t just attach a software program to ourselves or our employees to remain secure.

How the Pentagon Should Deter Cyber Attacks

How the Pentagon Should Deter Cyber Attacks

The most important lesson from Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election may be this: foreign hackers and propagandists are not afraid to launch attacks against the United States in and through cyberspace that they would not dare risk in a real theater of war. So as cyber aggression gets worse and more brazen every year, it’s crucial that the Department of Defense figures out how to deter foreign actors in cyberspace as effectively as in nuclear and conventional warfare. The Pentagon can take five steps to better deter foreign cyber attacks.

Chinese State Sponsored Hacking: It’s Time To Reach an Effective and Lasting Bilateral Agreement on Cyberwarfare

Chinese State Sponsored Hacking: It’s Time To Reach an Effective and Lasting Bilateral Agreement on Cyberwarfare

It remains to be seen whether or not the current administration’s approach to  China will bring further progress in terms of limiting cyber attacks. Ultimately, extending the terms of the 2015 agreement to explicitly ban attacks, to encourage co-operation in hardening financial institutions against them, and perhaps even mandate bi-lateral responses should they occur, would be in the mutual interest of both the U.S. and China.

Deviation From The Norm: Cyberattacks on the Rise

Deviation From The Norm: Cyberattacks on the Rise

 In a year when the breadth, extent, and impact of cyber attacks continues to expand as geopolitical tensions escalate, the creation of norms remains essential to shape behavior in cyberspace and identify which targets are off limits. However, as these latest attacks may demonstrate, absent any coherent cybersecurity strategy and response framework, adversaries will disregard norms as long as they can attack with impunity.

Creating a Safe and Prosperous Cyberspace: The Path to Ise-Shima Cybersecurity Norms

Creating a Safe and Prosperous Cyberspace: The Path to Ise-Shima Cybersecurity Norms

Over the last 30 years the international security environment has been characterized by several security deficits, which are defined as a government’s inability to meet its national security obligations without external support. Intra-state, transnational, and regional actors challenge a sovereign government’s ability to provide a secure environment for their citizens. While evident in countries like Syria and Afghanistan, it is also true in the cyber world.

#Reviewing Cyberspace in Peace and War

#Reviewing Cyberspace in Peace and War

While there have been many valuable contributions to our understanding of the digital realm from the social sciences, it has been a struggle on all fronts to transform those theoretical and empirical observations into cohesive, strategic and policy recommendations. Cyberspace in Peace and War is a huge stride in the right direction. Anyone interested in cyber security should have a copy of in their library, and going forward it should be regularly cited and referred to.

Negotiating an Advance: How Negotiation Can Shift the Digital Battlespace in Favor of the U.S.

Negotiating an Advance: How Negotiation Can Shift the Digital Battlespace in Favor of the U.S.

it is important to reintroduce many of the well understood concepts of strategy to the cyber-Security debate precisely because it adds clarity to an otherwise murky topic. While it is good to come to the right answer, it is also important that we understand the strategic relationships of different behaviors so that we can consistently prescribe proper policy. Understanding why negotiations are a good idea today will better help us determine if they are a good idea tomorrow, and hopefully forestall deleterious decisions based upon improper analogs.

Conceptualizing Emerging Strategic Challenges in the Cyber Age

Conceptualizing Emerging Strategic Challenges in the Cyber Age

Few at CyConUS were optimistic about the future of cyber restraint among states. Rather, it was the assertiveness of nation-states that featured prominently in many of the keynotes and panel discussions.  Whether the U.S. and its allies can respond effectively to these challenges, and the many others likely to follow, remains an open question. The cyber era is one of asymmetric conflict. For all of the billions of dollars the U.S. spends on cybersecurity through the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, determined attackers can find success for a minuscule fraction of that cost. Bending that cost-curve in a more favorable direction must be a top priority for the U.S. and its global partners.

The Russian DNC Hack: An Opportunity for Cyber Deterrence

The Russian DNC Hack: An Opportunity for Cyber Deterrence

Deterrence strategy, too, is essentially timeless, which inherently means it is applicable even to cyber warfare. While a legitimate threat of force lies at the heart of deterrence, different modes of warfare may be necessary to accomplish the true purpose of strategy as Clausewitz saw it:  the accomplishment political goals. The U.S. political goal in this case is to prevent attacks and other wicked acts perpetrated against America in the cyber realm. Though the U.S. definitely has heavy hands in the cyber boxing arena, a better strategy is to avoid punches altogether, rather than slugging it out in the middle of the ring.

C.O.D.E. Development: A Vision for Cyber Leaders

C.O.D.E. Development: A Vision for Cyber Leaders

Maneuvering through cyberspace in support of strategic objectives and Unified Land Operations requires cyber leaders to develop into “agile and adaptive leaders who are flexible, critically reflective, and comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.” The Army’s Cyber Branch must prepare leaders to improve competence in their technical requirements, remain operationally focused, seek lifelong development, and possess an entrepreneurial mindset through the application of learner-centric, adult learning models in the classroom to meet the needs of the Army as it defends the nation.

Cyber and the National Guard: A Strategic Trust

Cyber and the National Guard: A Strategic Trust

Threat drives technology. This has been the case for the U.S. military for the last 150 years. One could say that forecasting what the next threat will be is actually what drives technology. Two prime examples of this are coastal and air defenses of the United States in the beginning and middle of the 20th century. Now we are facing an ever-developing threat: cyber attacks against our nation’s infrastructure. These are becoming more invasive and dangerous to our national security, given how much a modern military relies on cyberspace for communication and command and control.