Cybersecurity
By Michael Liu
Michael is a second year History and International Relations student at Kings with particular interests in the structure-agency relationship of international affairs. He has a profound liking for the strategies and tactics of warfare in general, with a keen eye for examining modern low-intensity conflicts.
ensure that successful cases are usually seen as the host state’s failure to safeguard itself rather than some particular malignity on the adversary’s part. Cyberespionage certainly makes for alarmist headlines but is so far a general practice rather than a deviation in the international system.
Cybersecurity in 2021 from a statist perspective: advanced and persistent, but not exceptional. ew domains are imagined with such otherworldliness as cyberspace, helped no less by Sci-fi. Fiction certainly captures the subconscious and stretches possibilities; reality is somewhat disappointingly but also thankfully more steadfast. The cybersecurity risks confronting states today are certainly serious. They are however not otherworldly, subjected to the same escalation and restraining mechanics that govern typical diplomacy and conflict.
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The cyberespionage threat should persist with the ongoing pandemic, but as a continuation of typical trends. The pandemic has seen intelligence worldwide target vaccine research and development as part of global geopolitical rivalry for global technological dominance. [1] There is no denying that the stakes are high when state power fuses information and modern cyber technology. This, however, does not necessarily indicate increasing, or increased, danger. Espionage per se, whether in its severity or all-encompassing nature, is nothing new. It is an accepted feature of international relations to the extent that the US has not politically escalated its relations with Russia despite the scale of the recently discovered SolarWinds hack attributed to the SVR. [2] The prevalence of (cyber)espionage as a phenomenon tends to
A possible exception may be in US-China relations where US officials have cast Chinese cyberespionage in deterministically grave terms as part of growing US-China competition across all domains. [3] It should be noted still that the cyberespionage concern here is situated within a much broader set of issues relating to intellectual property, political economy and strategic competition. [4] Russia and many other countries no doubt commit similar cyberespionage against the US, but it is the sheer weight and complexity of the Chinese challenge that has made cyberespionage an open issue rather than its own intrinsic technicalities. How the issue develops between the US and China should thus be watched through the overall political climate rather than the pure technicalities of cybersecurity. With higher order threats as cyber disruption and cyberwarfare, the risks are significantly greater [GA1] though again, not necessarily exceptional. Some level of ambiguity still pervades the conduct of cyber operations. Cyber disruptions to critical civilian infrastructure, for instance, constitute a grey zone short of open war but allowing for kinetic repercussions still. Recent penetrations of the supply networks integral to vaccine
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