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Public and academic knowledge of cyber conflict relies heavily on data from commercial threat reporting. According to Lennart Maschmeyer, there are reasons to be concerned that these data provide a distorted view of cyber threat activity. This article analyzes an original dataset of available public reporting by the private sector together with independent research centers. It also presents three case studies tracing reporting patterns on a cyber operation targeting civil society. The findings confirm the neglect of civil society threats, supporting the hypothesis that commercial interests of firms will produce a systematic bias in reporting, which functions as much as advertising as intelligence. The result is a truncated sample of cyber conflict that underrepresents civil society targeting and distorts academic debate as well as public policy. ; Das öffentliche und akademische Wissen über Cyber-Konflikte stützt sich in hohem Masse auf Daten aus der kommerziellen Berichterstattung über Bedrohungen. Laut Lennart Maschmeyer gibt es Grund zur Sorge, dass diese Daten ein verzerrtes Bild der Cyber-Bedrohung vermitteln. In diesem Artikel wird ein Originaldatensatz der verfügbaren öffentlichen Berichterstattung des privaten Sektors zusammen mit der Berichterstattung unabhängiger Forschungszentren analysiert. Darüber hinaus werden drei Fallstudien vorgestellt, die die Berichterstattung über eine auf die Zivilgesellschaft gerichtete Cyber-Operation nachzeichnen. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen die Vernachlässigung zivilgesellschaftlicher Bedrohungen und stützen die Hypothese, dass kommerzielle Interessen von Firmen zu einer systematischen Verzerrung der Berichterstattung führen, was wiederum einen ähnlichen Effekt wie Werbung hat. Das Ergebnis ist eine unvollständige Stichprobe des Cyber-Konflikts, die das gezielte Anvisieren der Zivilgesellschaft herunterspielt und sowohl die akademische Debatte als auch die öffentliche Politik verzerrt. ; ISSN:1933-169X ; ISSN:1933-1681

This volume contributes substantively to our understanding of China and cybersecurity, both complex topics on their own, by exploring how China's domestic political and economic system shapes its cyber activities. The collaboration also stands as an example of how Chinese and Western experts can work together to improve trust and understanding in an area of great mutual concern

Defense policy makers have become increasingly concerned about conflict in the "gray zone" between peace and war. Such conflicts are often interpreted as cases of deterrence failures, as new technologies or tactics—from cyber operations to "little green men"—seem to increase the effectiveness of low-intensity aggression. However, gray zone conflict could also be a case of deterrence success, where challengers adopt a constrained form of aggression in response to a credible escalation threat. We develop a model that formalizes both scenarios and identifies distinct empirical patterns across the two cases. We use the model's findings to empirically analyze Russian gray zone activity since the 1990s, finding that Russian activity appears, in part, to be restrained by NATO's deterrent threat. Our model also shows that developing gray zone conflict capabilities can lead to more peace but could also backfire and provoke a challenger to escalate to war.

Defense policy makers have become increasingly concerned about conflict in the "gray zone" between peace and war. Such conflicts are often interpreted as cases of deterrence failures, as new technologies or tactics—from cyber operations to "little green men"—seem to increase the effectiveness of low-intensity aggression. However, gray zone conflict could also be a case of deterrence success, where challengers adopt a constrained form of aggression in response to a credible escalation threat. We develop a model that formalizes both scenarios and identifies distinct empirical patterns across the two cases. We use the model's findings to empirically analyze Russian gray zone activity since the 1990s, finding that Russian activity appears, in part, to be restrained by NATO's deterrent threat. Our model also shows that developing gray zone conflict capabilities can lead to more peace but could also backfire and provoke a challenger to escalate to war.

AbstractHow do international crises unfold? We conceptualize international relations as a strategic chess game between adversaries and develop a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over a hundred years of history. We introduce a new ontology and dataset of international events called ICBe based on a very high-quality corpus of narratives from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that ICBe has higher coverage, recall, and precision than existing state of the art datasets and conduct two detailed case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Crimea-Donbas Crisis (2014). We further introduce two new event visualizations (event iconography and crisis maps), an automated benchmark for measuring event recall using natural language processing (synthetic narratives), and an ontology reconstruction task for objectively measuring event precision. We make the data, supplementary appendix, replication material, and visualizations of every historical episode available at a companion website crisisevents.org.