Contested public attributions of cyber incidents and the role of academia

Abstract

Public attributions of cyber incidents by governments and private industry have become prevalent in recent years. This article argues that they display a skewed version of cyber conflict for several operational and structural reasons, including political, commercial, and legal constraints. In addition, public attribution of cyber incidents takes place in a heavily contested information environment, creating fractured narratives of a shared past. The article uses three cyber incidents (Sony Pictures, DNC, and NotPetya) to show how actors cope with this contested information environment and proposes a changed role of academia to address some of the problems that emerge. To become competent in contesting public attribution discourses, universities would have to work more across physical, disciplinary, and academic boundaries. The main implications for democracies are to be more transparent about how attribution is performed, enable other civilian actors to study cyber conflict, and thereby broaden the discourse on cybersecurity politics.

Cyber Terrorism and Public Support for Retaliation – A Multi-Country Survey Experiment

“…While fear and anxiety are a common response to exposure to terrorism, these do not always translate into heightened support for military retaliation or other corrective political acts, since fear is elicited primarily by attacks that are personally experienced (Haidt 2003; Huddy et al 2005). Likewise, the literature suggests that the intervening effect of threat perception is minimized in cases of limited information, such as with cyber terrorism (Egloff 2020). However, most recent research has identified that ‘the dominant response of civilian populations to terror threat is not fear and a desire to reduce future personal risk, but rather anger and a desire for vengeance’ (Wayne 2019, 5).…”

“…Alternative causal mechanisms that could theoretically mediate the relationship between exposure to terrorism and support for retaliation include anxiety and perceived threat. We do not hypothesize that either of these variables will intervene since most recent research suggests that anger is the dominant response of civilian populations to terror threats (Wayne 2019), and that the low-information features of cyber attacks are likely to mitigate the influence of perceived threat as a mediator (Egloff 2020). Still, mediation analyses replacing anger with anxiety, and replacing anxiety with threat perception, confirm that our model is robust to related variables (see Appendix F for full analyses) 1 .…”

Cyber Security Politics

“…According to the same logic, attribution of cyber operations to specific political actors remains time-consuming and often inconclusive . Neither states nor cyber intelligence firms have enough of an incentive to fully share the data, methods, and tools behind their attribution claims (Egloff 2020a, Egloff and. As a consequence, many attribution processes lack transparency and credibility, making it difficult to build broad and stable political support for response strategies based on inherently contested attribution claims (Egloff and Dunn Cavelty 2021).…”

Hitting back or holding back in cyberspace: Experimental evidence regarding Americans’ responses to cyberattacks

“…It may be difficult to attribute an attack to a certain perpetrator (Lindsay, 2015;Rid and Buchanan, 2015) and even more challenging to convince a potentially skeptical public of that attribution (Schulzke, 2018). Given the possibility of doubt in official sources, particularly intelligence agencies (Rovner, 2011), some have suggested that independent experts and academics could verify intelligence agencies' claims (Egloff, 2019). Empirical studies, however, have mostly left the relationship between attribution and support for retaliation unexamined.…”