Cyber Operations

4Nation‐State Cyber Operations

4.1 Nation State Cyber Operations

We will do a little review on how we arrived at this chapter. In Chapter 1, we looked at how some of the earliest known cyber operators attempted espionage through cyber collection. We also looked at terrorist operations over cyber. For example, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its successor, ISIS, used terrorist media messaging that was developed and improved during the Iraqi Insurgency (2004–2008) and post Coalition operations. These media operations included crowd emulation techniques that were eventually adopted by Russia and later used to provide strategic effects in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

In Chapter 2, we looked at the evolution of Al Qaeda, AQI, and ISIS in using the web. For example, AQI used cyber for covert communications and social media to post videos of their attacks and show results to their donors and potential recruits. ISIS then used social media to promote its interests while using the web as a means to communicate and transfer funds. This took us through the 2010s, when the ISIS proto‐state emerged from the web, lived as a physical entity, and then later (2017) went back into the web to further regroup.

In Chapter 3, we differentiated cyber native versus cyber‐enabled crime. This is a difference between a crime that is defined by cyber technical means versus a crime that is relatively well known (e.g., credit card theft) and is now being performed via web‐based technologies. In Chapter ...