Hybrid CoE Paper 7: Geopolitics and strategies in cyberspace: Actors, actions, structures and responses

During the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread hostile cyber-enabled activities have highlighted that no domain of public life is now immune to geopolitical or systemic competition. The spectrum of such hostile activities has encompassed ransomware attacks against medical facilities, intellectual property theft attempts against laboratories developing vaccines, as well as misinformation and disinformation campaigns. They have highlighted that ‘cyber’ has become ever more critical to our individual and collective security and an increasingly contested ‘space’ in its own right. This Hybrid CoE Paper analyzes why this is so, who operates in cyberspace and with what aims, and how some of the resulting security challenges are being addressed.