International Cybersecurity

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  • Some Observations about the Cyber Conflict between Israel and Hamas

    Some Observations about the Cyber Conflict between Israel and Hamas

    Matthias Schulze 22. January 2024 A German version of this blog post appeared in Tagesspiegel Background Cyber. As in Ukraine, the current war in the Middle East is once again being accompanied by a digital conflict. After two months of war, it is now possible to draw some preliminary conclusions about cyber capabilities in the…

  • Comment for Tagesspiegel article

    Comment for Tagesspiegel article

    Matthias was asked to comment on the article “Das sind psychologische Spielchen”: Wie Russland einen hybriden Krieg gegen die Nato führt,” which appeared in Tagesspiegel. In it, Lukas Kram describes the principles of Russia’s hybrid warfare against NATO countries, which includes cyber operations, disinformation, and psychological pressure. All aimed at undermining the adversaries’ resilience. You…

  • Shaping Cyber Security 2023: “Cyber in Conflict“ – Supporting Partners & Avoiding Escalation

    Shaping Cyber Security 2023: “Cyber in Conflict“ – Supporting Partners & Avoiding Escalation

    Cyberattacks and information operations accompanying the Russian invasion of Ukraine have underlined the disruptive potential of digital technologies well beyond the immediate conflict zone. Already prior to the war, criminal cyberattacks against critical infrastructure have become major national security threats, heightening geopolitical tensions due to tacit or even active state support.  Against the backdrop of…

  • ChatGPT, Bing Search, Bard & Friends – Part II

    ChatGPT, Bing Search, Bard & Friends – Part II

    Jantje Silomon 15 May 2023 Peeking under the Hood As mentioned in the last post, the ‘GPT’ part in ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” – just one example of a transformer model in a family of many dozens. Two graphics by Xavier Amatriain illustrate the model boom and interrelationship nicely: Xavier Amatriain: Five years of models…

  • ChatGPT, Bing Search, Bard & Friends – Part I

    ChatGPT, Bing Search, Bard & Friends – Part I

    Jantje Silomon 26 April 2023 Last November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot built on top of the GPT-3 Large Language Model (LLM) family. Its humanesque responses quickly garnered attention, from interviews and being hailed as “amazing, creative, and totally wrong” to calling it “dumber than you think“. It did not take long for people to try find…

  • Cybercrime as a Peace Risk – Why International Cooperation Concerns Us All

    Cybercrime as a Peace Risk – Why International Cooperation Concerns Us All

    Mischa Hansel 16 March 2023 Cybercrime and the fight against are no longer a niche topic: the economic repercussions alone are too high, costing the Federal Republic of Germany over 200 billion euros annually according to an estimate from the industry association Bitcom. However, other costs – such as the social and political issues that can aggravate…

  • Breaking Encryption: Once More unto the Breach, dear Friends, Once More

    Breaking Encryption: Once More unto the Breach, dear Friends, Once More

    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…

  • Advancing UN Cyber Norms: Multilateral Peer Review Mechanisms as a Way Forward – Part II

    Advancing UN Cyber Norms: Multilateral Peer Review Mechanisms as a Way Forward – Part II

    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…

  • Advancing UN Cyber Norms: Multilateral Peer Review Mechanisms as a Way Forward – Part I

    Advancing UN Cyber Norms: Multilateral Peer Review Mechanisms as a Way Forward – Part I

    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…

  • The Ukraine War and Dilemmas of Cybersecurity Governance – Part II

    The Ukraine War and Dilemmas of Cybersecurity Governance – Part II

    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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