Cyber Mercenaries

Author : Tim Maurer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108580262
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cyber Mercenaries written by Tim Maurer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cyber Mercenaries explores the secretive relationships between states and hackers. As cyberspace has emerged as the new frontier for geopolitics, states have become entrepreneurial in their sponsorship, deployment, and exploitation of hackers as proxies to project power. Such modern-day mercenaries and privateers can impose significant harm undermining global security, stability, and human rights. These state-hacker relationships therefore raise important questions about the control, authority, and use of offensive cyber capabilities. While different countries pursue different models for their proxy relationships, they face the common challenge of balancing the benefits of these relationships with their costs and the potential risks of escalation. This book examines case studies in the United States, Iran, Syria, Russia, and China for the purpose of establishing a framework to better understand and manage the impact and risks of cyber proxies on global politics.

Author : Tim Maurer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107127602
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cyber Mercenaries written by Tim Maurer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cyber Mercenaries explores how and why states use hackers as proxies to project power through cyberspace.

Author : James (J.F.) Forest
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
ISBN 13 : 1682477525
Total Pages : 143 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Digital Influence Mercenaries written by James (J.F.) Forest and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's online attention economy, supply and demand have created a rapidly growing market for firms and entrepreneurs using the tactics, tools, and strategies of digital influence warfare to gain profit and power. This book focuses on the more malicious types of online activity such as deception, provocation, and a host of other dirty tricks conducted by these "digital influence mercenaries." They can be located anywhere with an Internet connection--Brazil, China, Iran, Macedonia, Russia, Zimbabwe--and the targets of their influence efforts can be whomever and wherever they are paid to attack. They can do this for state governments willing to pay and provide their targeting instructions (usually in support of foreign policy objectives) and may have specific metrics by which they will assess the mercenaries' performance. Non-state actors (including corporations and political parties) can pay for these kinds of digital influence services as well. And in addition to being paid for services rendered, digital influence mercenaries can also profit simply by manipulating the targeted advertising algorithms used by social media platforms. James J. F. Forest describes in detail the various tools and tactics these mercenaries use to exploit the uncertainties, fears, and biases of their targets including bots, deep-fake images, fake news, provocation, deception and trolling. He also shows how they weaponize conspiracy theories and disinformation to manipulate people's beliefs and perceptions. Forest also highlights how government agencies and social media platforms are trying to defend against these foreign influence campaigns through such tactics as shutting down offending websites, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels; tagging disinformation with warning labels; identifying and blocking coordinated inauthentic behavior; and suspending social media accounts, often permanently. European and North American governments have launched numerous investigations against these mercenaries, and in some cases have brought criminal charges. Forest concludes with suggestions for how each of us can learn to identify disinformation and other malicious efforts and defend ourselves in the future.

Author : Tim Maurer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110857405X
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cyber Mercenaries written by Tim Maurer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cyber Mercenaries explores the secretive relationships between states and hackers. As cyberspace has emerged as the new frontier for geopolitics, states have become entrepreneurial in their sponsorship, deployment, and exploitation of hackers as proxies to project power. Such modern-day mercenaries and privateers can impose significant harm undermining global security, stability, and human rights. These state-hacker relationships therefore raise important questions about the control, authority, and use of offensive cyber capabilities. While different countries pursue different models for their proxy relationships, they face the common challenge of balancing the benefits of these relationships with their costs and the potential risks of escalation. This book examines case studies in the United States, Iran, Syria, Russia, and China for the purpose of establishing a framework to better understand and manage the impact and risks of cyber proxies on global politics.

Author : Sean McFate
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190621087
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Modern Mercenary written by Sean McFate and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-10 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Modern Mercenary, Sean McFate lays bare this opaque world, explaining the economic structure of the industry and showing in detail how firms operate on the ground. A former U.S. Army paratrooper and private military contractor, McFate provides an unparalleled perspective into the nuts and bolts of the industry, as well as a sobering prognosis for the future of war. While at present, the U.S. government and U.S. firms dominate the market, private military companies are emerging from other countries, and warlords and militias have restyled themselves as private security companies in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. To understand how the proliferation of private forces may influence international relations, McFate looks back to the European Middle Ages, when mercenaries were common and contract warfare the norm. He concludes that international relations in the twenty-first century may have more in common with the twelfth century than the twentieth. This "back to the future" situation, which he calls "neomedievalism," is not necessarily a negative condition, but it will produce a global system that contains rather than solves problems.

Author : Brandon Valeriano
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190618116
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cyber Strategy written by Brandon Valeriano and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some pundits claim cyber weaponry is the most important military innovation in decades, a transformative new technology that promises a paralyzing first-strike advantage difficult for opponents to deter. Yet, what is cyber strategy? How do actors use cyber capabilities to achieve a position of advantage against rival states? This book examines the emerging art of cyber strategy and its integration as part of a larger approach to coercion by states in the international system between 2000 and 2014. To this end, the book establishes a theoretical framework in the coercion literature for evaluating the efficacy of cyber operations. Cyber coercion represents the use of manipulation, denial, and punishment strategies in the digital frontier to achieve some strategic end. As a contemporary form of covert action and political warfare, cyber operations rarely produce concessions and tend to achieve only limited, signaling objectives. When cyber operations do produce concessions between rival states, they tend to be part of a larger integrated coercive strategy that combines network intrusions with other traditional forms of statecraft such as military threats, economic sanctions, and diplomacy. The books finds that cyber operations rarely produce concessions in isolation. They are additive instruments that complement traditional statecraft and coercive diplomacy. The book combines an analysis of cyber exchanges between rival states and broader event data on political, military, and economic interactions with case studies on the leading cyber powers: Russia, China, and the United States. The authors investigate cyber strategies in their integrated and isolated contexts, demonstrating that they are useful for maximizing informational asymmetries and disruptions, and thus are important, but limited coercive tools. This empirical foundation allows the authors to explore how leading actors employ cyber strategy and the implications for international relations in the 21st century. While most military plans involving cyber attributes remain highly classified, the authors piece together strategies based on observations of attacks over time and through the policy discussion in unclassified space. The result will be the first broad evaluation of the efficacy of various strategic options in a digital world.

Author : Edward Lucas
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1632862263
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cyberphobia written by Edward Lucas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cybercrime is increasingly in the news on both an individual and national level--from the stolen identities and personal information of millions of Americans to the infiltration of our national security networks allowing access to both economic and trade secrets. In Cyberphobia, Edward Lucas unpacks this shadowy but metastasizing problem confronting our security. The uncomfortable truth is that we do not take cybersecurity seriously enough. When it comes to the internet, it might as well be the Wild West. Standards of securing our computers and other internet-connected technology are diverse, but just like the rules of the road meant to protect both individual drivers and everyone else driving alongside them, weak cybersecurity on the computers and internet systems near us put everyone at risk. Lucas sounds a necessary alarm on behalf of cybersecurity and prescribes immediate and bold solutions to this grave threat.

Author : National Defense University Press
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781678665234
Total Pages : 56 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mercenaries and War written by National Defense University Press and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-18 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mercenaries are more powerful than experts realize, a grave oversight. Those who assume they are cheap imitations of national armed forces invite disaster because for-profit warriors are a wholly different genus and species of fighter. Private military companies such as the Wagner Group are more like heavily armed multinational corporations than the Marine Corps. Their employees are recruited from different countries, and profitability is everything. Patriotism is unimportant, and sometimes a liability. Unsurprisingly, mercenaries do not fight conventionally, and traditional war strategies used against them may backfire.

Author : Nicole Perlroth
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1526629836
Total Pages : 529 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends written by Nicole Perlroth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE FT & McKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021 The instant New York Times bestseller A Financial Times and The Times Book of the Year 'A terrifying exposé' The Times 'Part John le Carré . . . Spellbinding' New Yorker We plug in anything we can to the internet. We can control our entire lives, economy and grid via a remote web control. But over the past decade, as this transformation took place, we never paused to think that we were also creating the world's largest attack surface. And that the same nation that maintains the greatest cyber advantage on earth could also be among its most vulnerable. Filled with spies, hackers, arms dealers and a few unsung heroes, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is an astonishing and gripping feat of journalism. Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Nicole Perlroth lifts the curtain on a market in shadow, revealing the urgent threat faced by us all if we cannot bring the global cyber arms race to heel.

Author : Lucas Kello
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300226292
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Virtual Weapon and International Order written by Lucas Kello and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgently needed examination of the current cyber revolution that draws on case studies to develop conceptual frameworks for understanding its effects on international order The cyber revolution is the revolution of our time. The rapid expansion of cyberspace brings both promise and peril. It promotes new modes of political interaction, but it also disrupts interstate dealings and empowers non-state actors who may instigate diplomatic and military crises. Despite significant experience with cyber phenomena, the conceptual apparatus to analyze, understand, and address their effects on international order remains primitive. Here, Lucas Kello adapts and applies international relations theory to create new ways of thinking about cyber strategy. Kello draws on a broad range of case studies, including the Estonian crisis, the Olympic Games operation against Iran, and the cyber attack against Sony Pictures. Synthesizing qualitative data from government documents, forensic reports of major incidents and interviews with senior officials from around the globe, this important work establishes new conceptual benchmarks to help security experts adapt strategy and policy to the unprecedented challenges of our times.