On a cloudless morning last May, a pilot took off from the Niagara Falls International Airport, heading for restricted military airspace over Lake Ontario. The plane, which bore the insignia of the United States Air Force, was a repurposed Czechoslovak jet, an L-39 Albatros, purchased by a private defense contractor.

Several governments including the United States recognize the criticality of protecting critical infrastructure as a national security priority.  But there is little headway in determining what, if any, operations against critical infrastructure are acceptable.  Without such consensus, nation states are left to their own devices, opting to use sanctions or retaliatory cyber strikes to register their complaints.  These are poor options, as lack of setting such redlines and having governments sign on to them risks a cyber incident being misinterpreted and misunderstood, and thereby, increasing the chance for state-on-state escalation via disproportionate retaliation.

A new HP report details how the world is coming increasingly close to armed conflict sparked by cyberattacks. The study was compiled by University of Surrey senior lecturer in criminology, Mike McGuire. The study claims that there has been a 100% increase in significant state-backed attacks between 2017 and 2020.

The Atlantic Council recently conducted a study in order to assess the extent to which fears about the possible escalation of cyber conflicts between countries into physical confrontations are justified. The research involved “cross-national simulation and survey experiments” and focused on the United States, Russia and Israel. The conclusion of

In a new report, the US nonprofit Consumer Watchdog (CW) warns that Internet-connected vehicles are a threat to national security due to the risk of coordinated hacking attacks that could target many vehicles at the same time. Currently, connected cars make up 20% of all vehicles on American roads and

The deteriorating relations between the United States and Iran have been a catalyst for further integration between cyber operations and physical acts in the context of national defense. In the midst of mounting tensions, both countries have been stepping up offensive cyber campaigns directed at each other, thereby effectively using

In response to a recent New York Times report claiming that US intelligence officials have been targeting Russian power grid control systems in offensive operations, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday said that the report implies “a hypothetical possibility” of cyberwarfare against his country. The Russian official also

A newly released report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) looks at the potential human cost of cyber attacks. The study is based on discussions by academics and cybersecurity experts on how cyberattacks impact civilians. The report also looks at the impact of cyber operations that are

According to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, “we are in the very beginning of the cyber arms race.” Due to technological innovation, wars are now increasingly fought in the digital realm and this has major security implications. While deterrence assures a high threshold for the use of the

As acts of cyberwar by nation-state threat actors are becoming increasingly common and disruptive, the goals of attacking parties include damaging critical infrastructure; stealing military data and technology; spreading disinformation; and, increasingly, stealing civilian data. According to Terry Ray, Chief Technology Officer at Imperva, companies, educational institutions, medial instantiations and other