A primer on the proliferation of offensive cyber capabilities Issue Brief by Winnona DeSombre, Michele Campobasso, Dr. Luca Allodi, Dr. James Shires, JD Work, Robert Morgus, Patrick Howell O’Neill, and Dr. Trey Herr
Executive summary
Offensive cyber capabilities run the gamut from sophisticated, long-term disruptions of physical infrastructure to malware used to target human rights journalists. As these capabilities continue to proliferate with increasing complexity and to new types of actors, the imperative to slow and counter their spread only strengthens. But to confront this growing menace, practitioners and policy makers must understand the processes and incentives behind it. The issue of cyber capability proliferation has often been presented as attempted export controls on intrusion software, creating a singular emphasis on malware components. This primer reframes the narrative o
a telephone conversation yesterday where john kerry said, you know, there have been arrests recently of russian intelligence operatives operating in that part of the country, and reminded sergey lavrov that kiev believes they are behind all of this. this is something that lavrov himself has completely denied and just says that this is the u.s. ascribing to them what, in fact, the u.s. is doing itself. and interestingly, the foreign ministry here in russia today, carol, said that there were kiev forces forces from kiev alongside various people from the right sector, with american mercenaries, they said, belonging to the contracting firm graystone, who were operating and trying to stop protesters from having their voices heard. of course, this is an allegation that we ve heard in russian propaganda in the last couple of weeks, really. it s difficult to confirm ourselves, but that is certainly the claim russia is making.