The Russian regime's struggle for internal control drives multifaceted actions in cyberspace that do not stop at national borders. Cybercrime, technical hacking, and disinformation are complementary tools to preserve national power internally while projecting effects onto myriad neighbors and rivals. Russian activity in the cyber domain is infamous in the United States and other Western countries. Weaponizing Cyberspace explores the Russian proclivity, particularly in the 21st century, for using cyberspace as an environment in which to launch technical attacks and disinformation campaigns that sow chaos and distraction in ways that provide short-term advantage to autocrats in the Kremlin. Arguing that Russia's goal is to divide people, Sambaluk explains that Russia's modus operandi in disinformation campaigning is specifically to find and exploit existing sore spots in other countries. In the U.S., this often means inflaming political tensions among people on the far left and far right. Russia's actions have taken different forms, including the sophisticated surveillance and sabotage of critical infrastructure, the ransoming of data by criminal groups, and a welter of often mutually contradictory disinformation messages that pollute online discourse within and beyond Russia. Whether deployed to contribute to hybrid war or to psychological fracture and disillusionment in targeted societies, the threat is real and must be understood and effectively addressed.

The Russian regime's struggle for internal control drives multifaceted actions in cyberspace that do not stop at national borders. Cybercrime, technical hacking, and disinformation are complementary tools to preserve national power internally while projecting effects onto myriad neighbors and rivals. Russian activity in the cyber domain is infamous in the United States and other Western countries. Weaponizing Cyberspace explores the Russian proclivity, particularly in the 21st century, for using cyberspace as an environment in which to launch technical attacks and disinformation campaigns that sow chaos and distraction in ways that provide short-term advantage to autocrats in the Kremlin. Arguing that Russia's goal is to divide people, Sambaluk explains that Russia's modus operandi in disinformation campaigning is specifically to find and exploit existing sore spots in other countries. In the U.S., this often means inflaming political tensions among people on the far left and far right. Russia's actions have taken different forms, including the sophisticated surveillance and sabotage of critical infrastructure, the ransoming of data by criminal groups, and a welter of often mutually contradictory disinformation messages that pollute online discourse within and beyond Russia. Whether deployed to contribute to hybrid war or to psychological fracture and disillusionment in targeted societies, the threat is real and must be understood and effectively addressed.

Impending technological advances will widen an adversary’s attack plane over the next decade. Visualizing what the future will hold, and what new threat vectors could emerge, is a task that traditional planning mechanisms struggle to accomplish given the wide range of potential issues. Understanding and preparing for the future operating environment is the basis of an analytical method known as Threatcasting. It is a method that gives researchers a structured way to envision and plan for risks ten years in the future. Threatcasting uses input from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and even a little science fiction to recognize future threats and design potential futures. During this human-centric process, participants brainstorm what actions can be taken to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the possible threats. Specifically, groups explore how to transform the future they desire into reality while avoiding an undesired future. The Threatcasting method also exposes what events could happen that indicate the progression toward an increasingly possible threat landscape. This book begins with an overview of the Threatcasting method with examples and case studies to enhance the academic foundation. Along with end-of-chapter exercises to enhance the reader’s understanding of the concepts, there is also a full project where the reader can conduct a mock Threatcasting on the topic of “the next biological public health crisis.” The second half of the book is designed as a practitioner’s handbook. It has three separate chapters (based on the general size of the Threatcasting group) that walk the reader through how to apply the knowledge from Part I to conduct an actual Threatcasting activity. This book will be useful for a wide audience (from student to practitioner) and will hopefully promote new dialogues across communities and novel developments in the area.

In a very short time, individuals and companies have harnessed cyberspace to create new industries, a vibrant social space, and a new economic sphere that are intertwined with our everyday lives. At the same time, individuals, subnational groups, and governments are using cyberspace to advance interests through malicious activity. Terrorists recruit, train, and target through the Internet, hackers steal data, and intelligence services conduct espionage. Still, the vast majority of cyberspace is civilian space used by individuals, businesses, and governments for legitimate purposes. Cyberspace and National Security brings together scholars, policy analysts, and information technology executives to examine current and future threats to cyberspace. They discuss various approaches to advance and defend national interests, contrast the US approach with European, Russian, and Chinese approaches, and offer new ways and means to defend interests in cyberspace and develop offensive capabilities to compete there. Policymakers and strategists will find this book to be an invaluable resource in their efforts to ensure national security and answer concerns about future cyberwarfare.

In a very short time, individuals and companies have harnessed cyberspace to create new industries, a vibrant social space, and a new economic sphere that are intertwined with our everyday lives. At the same time, individuals, subnational groups, and governments are using cyberspace to advance interests through malicious activity. Terrorists recruit, train, and target through the Internet, hackers steal data, and intelligence services conduct espionage. Still, the vast majority of cyberspace is civilian space used by individuals, businesses, and governments for legitimate purposes. Cyberspace and National Security brings together scholars, policy analysts, and information technology executives to examine current and future threats to cyberspace. They discuss various approaches to advance and defend national interests, contrast the US approach with European, Russian, and Chinese approaches, and offer new ways and means to defend interests in cyberspace and develop offensive capabilities to compete there. Policymakers and strategists will find this book to be an invaluable resource in their efforts to ensure national security and answer concerns about future cyberwarfare.

“A prescient and important book. . . . Fascinating.”—The New York Review of Books No single invention of the last half century has changed the way we live now as much as the Internet. Alexander Klimburg was a member of the generation for whom it was a utopian ideal turned reality: a place where ideas, information, and knowledge could be shared and new freedoms found and enjoyed. Two decades later, the future isn’t so bright any more: increasingly, the Internet is used as a weapon and a means of domination by states eager to exploit or curtail global connectivity in order to further their national interests. Klimburg is a leading voice in the conversation on the implications of this dangerous shift, and in The Darkening Web, he explains why we underestimate the consequences of states’ ambitions to project power in cyberspace at our peril: Not only have hacking and cyber operations fundamentally changed the nature of political conflict—ensnaring states in a struggle to maintain a precarious peace that could rapidly collapse into all-out war—but the rise of covert influencing and information warfare has enabled these same global powers to create and disseminate their own distorted versions of reality in which anything is possible. At stake are not only our personal data or the electrical grid, but the Internet as we know it today—and with it the very existence of open and democratic societies. Blending anecdote with argument, Klimburg brings us face-to-face with the range of threats the struggle for cyberspace presents, from an apocalyptic scenario of debilitated civilian infrastructure to a 1984-like erosion of privacy and freedom of expression. Focusing on different approaches to cyber-conflict in the US, Russia and China, he reveals the extent to which the battle for control of the Internet is as complex and perilous as the one surrounding nuclear weapons during the Cold War—and quite possibly as dangerous for humanity as a whole. Authoritative, thought-provoking, and compellingly argued, The Darkening Web makes clear that the debate about the different aspirations for cyberspace is nothing short of a war over our global values.

In The Geopolitics of Cyberspace: A Diplomatic Perspective, Riordan explores the extent to which the key concepts of classical and critical Geopolitics can be applied to cyberspace, and how they might explain the behaviour of key state and non-state actors. Case studies seek to apply both kinds of geopolitical analysis to the US, Russia, China, the EU and internet companies, discussing what it can tell us about their past and future behaviour. Riordan then explores the implications for both the theory and, especially, the practice of diplomacy in relationship to cyberspace. He argues that foreign ministries and diplomatic services need to reform both their culture and structures to engage successfully with the challenges posed by cyberspace. Underlying the article is an attempt to rescue both diplomacy and geopolitics from popular usages that risk emptying both concepts of meaning.