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Jantje Silomon 17 January 2023 While the West was settling down to the Christmas holidays and looking forward to a quiet turn-of-the-year, a group of researchers uploaded a paper to arxiv.org, an open-access repository with over 2 million scholarly articles. The site is well-known with the natural science community, having started off in the 1990s as a…
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Emilia Neuber (Hertie School of Governance) & Mischa Hansel (IFSH) 09 January 2023 Credibility and Impartiality Technical indicators, standards, and criteria do not set peer review apart from other review mechanisms. Rather, it is the political authority of a state-led process as opposed to an evaluation by, say, a technical secretariat of an UN treaty…
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Emilia Neuber (Hertie School of Governance) & Mischa Hansel (IFSH) 05 January 2023 Peer review mechanisms are widely used to facilitate the implementation of regulations and guidelines in various policy areas, including for example cybersecurity certification or ICT risk assessment. However, such mechanisms might also offer a new approach to the challenges of implementing the UN norms of responsible state…
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Mischa Hansel 13 December 2022 Crime, Proxies and Liberal Democracies Politically motivated individuals and hacker collectives have not been the only ones participating in the cyber confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. Conti, one of the most notorious ransomware gangs, declared their solidarity with the Russian government and threatened retaliation against any Western action within days of the…
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Mischa Hansel 05 December 2022 The Ukraine War has reiterated the urgency for addressing substantial peace and security risk of cyber operations. While there have not been any successful large-scale destructive cyberattacks thus far, the way in which cyber capabilities have been used by both state and non-state actors nevertheless has worrying implications. Existing dilemmas…
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Mischa Hansel 17 November 2022 The growth of the global surveillance industry and the proliferation of access-as-a-service in particular has become a serious national security and human rights concern in recent years. For example, Pegasus software was allegedly used to target Hanan Elatr’s mobile phone, just months before her husband Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi…
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Vulnerabilities in hardware and software products are a gateway for cyber criminals, and state actors should thus be interested in promoting responsible disclosure and timely remediation. However, intelligence and security agencies also exploit vulnerabilities, sometimes holding vulnerabilities back or even actively seeking to acquire them. Thus, the role of state actors within the global vulnerability…
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End of June 2022 the ICS team conducted a workshop in cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office on cyber security within the framework of the dialogue processes on the German National Security Strategy. The hybrid event centred on four thematic blocks, each introduced by short keynote speeches followed by discussions, and was held under Chatham…
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The harmful effects of cross-border criminal cyber-attacks were made abundantly clear as hospitals, energy providers, and other infrastructure services were indiscriminately hit or even directly targeted last year. Meanwhile, UN member states embarked on a new negotiation process with the goal of creating a global convention against the criminal misuse of information and communication technology.…
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IFSH research focus International Cybersecurity recently held its second interdisciplinary workshop, focusing on which actors and procedures could advance the implementation of the UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. The short presentations by Jacqueline Eggenschwiler (University of Oxford), Alexander Klimburg (Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace), Sheetal Kumar (Global Partners Digital) and Mischa Hansel (IFSH) shed…