Studying Cyberwar

The Washington Post has a great piece about the InfoWar Monitor project, including interviews with my former ONI colleagues Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski. Cyberwar is a new, murky, and fascinating zone of interstate conflict. Most interestingly, it’s one where combat is outsourced: hackers and denial of service attacks can come from volunteers and on-line fellow travelers as easily as from military computer labs or intelligence services. InfoWar Monitor is a civilian effort to track, study, and report on this new arena of combat. Like Internet filtering, cyberwar is difficult to detect and even harder to allocate accountability for. The recent conflict between Russia and Georgia, and previous attacks in Belarus, show how central the Internet is becoming to contests between and within countries. Stay tuned.

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