A Chinese Perspective on the Growing High-Tech Cold War

In Chinese online discussions, many people are using the expression “one sword throat-slashing strike.” [一剑封喉] This forbidding term refers to the United States’ seven-year export ban on China’s second-largest telecom supplier, ZTE, which threatens its very existence and has put the company “in a state of shock.” In the Chinese...

WHOIS afraid of the dark? Truth or illusion, let’s know the difference when it comes to WHOIS

“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.” Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?   Since February, the prominent security reporter Brian Krebs has been writing on his widely-read blog, Krebs on Security, that...

Defusing the cybersecurity dilemma game through attribution and network monitoring

States are stuck in a “cybersecurity dilemma”. They can’t reliably distinguish between other states’ offensive and defensive activities. E.g., surveillance or probing being used by a state for defense might look like offensive measures to those states being surveilled or probed. As a result, cyber powers engage in a never...

Blowback: An overlooked truth about Russian information operations

At the International Studies Association convention in San Francisco, at an especially interesting panel on cybersecurity, we were privileged to hear excerpts from a forthcoming book by Michael Warner, Historian for the United States Cyber Command, and John Childress. Warner examined the last 20 years of U.S. Russia relationships in...