Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

What Senior U.S. Leaders Say We Should Know About Cyber, Dr. Joseph H. Schafer

Military Cyber Affairs

On April 6, 2023, the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative hosted a panel discussion on the new National Cybersecurity Strategy. The panel featured four senior officials from the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), the Department of State (DoS), the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The author attended and asked each official to identify the most important elements that policymakers and strategists must understand about cyber. This article highlights historical and recent struggles to express cyber policy, the responses from these officials, and the author’s ongoing research to improve national security cyber policy.

An Analysis Of International Agreements Over Cybersecurity, Lucas Ashbaugh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research into the international agreements that increase cooperation over cybersecurity challenges is severely lacking. This is a necessary next step for bridging diplomatic challenges over cybersecurity. This work aspires to be push the bounds of research into these agreements and offer a tool that future researchers can rely on. For this research I created, and made publicly available, the International Cybersecurity Cooperation Dataset (ICCD), which contains over 350 international cybersecurity agreements and pertinent metadata. Each agreement is marked per which subtopics within cybersecurity related agreements it covers. These typologies are:

• Discussion and Dialogue

• Research

• Confidence Building Measures

• Incident Response

• Crime …

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Failed Cyberdefense - The Environmental Consequences Of Hostile Acts, Jan Kallberg, Rosemary A. Burk

Jan Kallberg

A failed cyberdefense can have wider effects than discussed in earlier debates of potential consequences of a cyberattack. The need for cyberdefense to protect the environment has not drawn the attention it deserves as a national security matter. Adversarial nations are covertly pursuing methods to damage and disrupt the United States in a cyberconflict in the future. The president of the United States noted this in Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense: Both state and non-state actors possess the capability and intent to conduct cyberespionage and, potentially, cyberattacks on the United States, with possible severe effects on …

Cyber Power Restrained: How Strategic Culture Inhibits The Integration Of Cyber Weapons By The United States Military, David Matthew Bisson

Senior Projects Spring 2014

This article seeks to reconcile the support status of cyber power in the United States military with the seriousness of the cyber threat confronting the nation. It rejects the argument that cyber weapons are not useful and are not traditional “weapons” by drawing parallels between cyber power and military force in the physical domains, as well as revealing how some of the most prominent issues in cybersecurity are political and not technological in nature. The article proposes strategic culture as an alternative explanation for U.S. cyber power’s current status. By studying the case studies of American air and space power, …

Cyber Attack: A Dull Tool To Sharpen Foreign Policy, Emilio Iasiello

Emilio Iasiello

This paper examines how cyber attacks, if indeed conducted by nation states, have been unsuccessful in supporting states' foreign policy objectives. By analyzing three prominent case studies, I show that as a result of geopolitical tensions, cyber attacks were implemented to further nation state objectives in support of foreign policy considerations and failed to achieve their respective outcomes despite successful deployment against their intended targets. The three case studies, hypothetical scenarios because attribution has not been confirmed, include: (1) the October 2012 distributed denial of service attacks targeting the U.S. banking sector; (2) the 2012 Stuxnet attack against Iran; and …

From Cyber Terrorism To State Actors’ Covert Cyber Operations, Jan Kallberg, Bhavani Thuraisingham

Jan Kallberg

Historically, since the Internet started to become a common feature in our lives, hackers have been seen as a major threat. This view has repeatedly been entrenched and distributed by media coverage and commentaries through the years. Instead the first twenty year of the Internet was acceptably secure, due to the limited abilities of the attackers, compared to the threat generated from a militarized Internet with state actors conducting cyber operations. In reality, the Internet have a reversed trajectory for its security where it has become more unsafe over time and moved from a threat to the individual to a …

Offensive Cyber: Superiority Or Stuck In Legal Hurdles?, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

In recent years, offensive cyber operations have attracted significant interest from the non-Defense Department academic legal community, prompting numerous articles seeking to create a legal theory for cyber conflicts. Naturally, cyber operations should be used in an ethical way, but the hurdles generated by the legal community are staggering. At a time when the United States has already lost an estimated $4 trillion in intellectual property as a result of foreign cyber espionage, not to mention the loss of military advantage, focusing on what the United States cannot do in cyberspace only hinders efforts to defend the country from future …

The Return Of Dr. Strangelove: How Austerity Makes Us Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb…And Cyber War, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

With sequestration looming—generating significant cuts to defense spending—the United States may find itself increasingly relying on nuclear and cyber deterrence as an affordable way to guarantee national sovereignty and prevent major conflict. While earlier defense planning and acquisitions were based on economic conditions that no longer exist, Congress’ options to balance the budget by cutting defense spending are politically palatable because far fewer American are “defense voters” than “social welfare voters,” according to a number of recent public opinion surveys.

Book Review: Handbook On Securing Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructure: Foundations And Challenges (Written By Sajal K. Das, Krishna Kant, Nan Zhang), Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

This 800+ page handbook is divided into eight parts and contains thirty chapters, ideal for either an advanced undergraduate or graduate course in security. At the heart of this handbook is how we might go about managing both physical and cyber infrastructures, as they continue to become embedded and enmeshed, through advanced control systems, and new computing and communications paradigms.

The Return Of Dr. Strangelove, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

With the prospect of sequestration looming, the United States may find itself increasingly rely ing on nuclear and cy ber deterrence as an affordable means of guaranteeing national sovereignty and preventing major conflict between the U.S. and potential adversaries in the Asia-Pacific. While earlier defense planning and acquisition were based on economic conditions that no longer ex ist, Congress’s options to balance the budget by cutting defense spending are politically palatable because far fewer American are “defense v oters” relative to “social welfare voters,” according to a number of recent public opinion surveys. The simple fact is China’s rise has …

Designer Satellite Collisions From Covert Cyber War, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Outer space has enjoyed two decades of fairly peaceful development since the Cold War, but once again it is becoming more competitive and contested, with increased militarization. Therefore, it is important the United States maintain its space superiority to ensure it has the capabilities required by modern warfare for successful operations. Today is different from earlier periods of space development,1 because there is not a blatantly overt arms race in space,2 but instead a covert challenge to US interests in maintaining superiority, resilience, and capability. A finite number of states consider themselves geopolitical actors; however, as long as the United …