ArgumentHackers Are Everywhere. Here’s How Scholars Can Find Them.

Published 27 February 2020

The world of cyber operations is full of hard national security choices. Ben Buchanan asks: “How do long-held ideas of counterintelligence, deterrence and deception apply in this new arena of competition? How does escalation work with hacking? Who carried out this intrusion, and what was the intention behind it? Most of all, what does any of this mean for geopolitics in the modern age, and how can scholars communicate that to policymakers?”

The world of cyber operations is full of hard national security choices. How do long-held ideas of counterintelligence, deterrence and deception apply in this new arena of competition? How does escalation work with hacking? Who carried out this intrusion, and what was the intention behind it? Most of all, what does any of this mean for geopolitics in the modern age, and how can scholars communicate that to policymakers?

Ben Buchanan writes in Lawfare that there are different ways to approach these questions.

Some scholars have constructed intricate formal models that use game theory to predict how states will behave in cyberspace. Others have used surveys and war games, asking participants to imagine what they would do in various situations of crisis. Still others have expanded the aperture of study, creating vast catalogs of cyber incidents, even comparatively minor ones, and subjecting them to quantitative analysis. All these approaches are valid.

But I want to advocate for a different technique, one that does not replace the others but supplements them: Deeply study the hacks that have taken place. This case study method is out of vogue in political science, which has preferred large-n samples and regression models. But in the world of government hacking operations, where the notable public cases are only a few dozen in number, examining these cases in detail can offer insights that would otherwise be missed—or add support to theories that need it.

This is the approach that I took in my new book, The Hacker and the State, which examines how nations have competed in cyberspace over the past two decades.