Repression, Education, and Politically Motivated Cyberattacks

Asal, Victor; Mauslein, Jacob A.; Murdie, Amanda; Young, Joseph K.; Cousins, Ken; Bronk, Chris

doi:10.1093/jogss/ogw006

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…The challenge is collecting data on cyber repressive events which are akin to human rights violations. Some have made strides examining individual state repressive incidents (Gohdes, 2015), while others have demonstrated that states experiencing DDoS attacks are also likely the victims of internal repression (Asal et al, 2016).…”

Section: Data Investigations Of the Future What Comes Next?mentioning

confidence: 99%

How We Stopped Worrying about Cyber Doom and Started Collecting Data

Valeriano

Maness

2018

PaG

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Moderate and measured takes on cyber security threats are swamped by the recent flood of research and policy positions in the cyber research field offering hyperbolic perspectives based on limited observations. This skewed perspective suggests constant cyber disasters that are confronting humanity constantly. The general tone of the debate argues that cyber war is already upon us and our future will only witness more cyber doom. However, these hyperbolic perspectives are being countered by empirical investigations that produce the opposite of what is to be expected. It is generally observed that limited cyber engagements throughout the geopolitical system are the dominant form of interaction. Our task here is to offer a different path forward. We first posit what can be known about cyber security interactions with data as well as what cannot. Where is the water's edge in cyber security research? We then examine the known works in the field that utilize data and evidence to examine cyber security processes. Finally, we conclude with an offering of what types of studies need to be done in the future to move the field forward, away from the prognostication and generalizations so typical in the discourse in this constantly changing and growing field.

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Section: Data Investigations Of the Future What Comes Next?mentioning

confidence: 99%

How We Stopped Worrying about Cyber Doom and Started Collecting Data

Valeriano

Maness

2018

PaG

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“…The main data for this study comes from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego from 2008-2016(CAIDA, 2016.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This article proceeds as follows. First, building on literature on emotions in international relations (Sasley, 2011) and previous works on politically motivated DoS attacks (e.g., Asal et al, 2016;Deibert, Rohozinski and Crete-Nishihata, 2012;Valeriano, Jensen and Maness, 2018), I discuss why the frequency of DoS attacks should increase against countries when they threaten or impose sanctions. Afterward, I introduce the data on DoS attacks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Retaliation? Denial-of-Service Attacks After Sanction Events

Lutscher¹

2020

Preprint

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Cyberattacks have been portrayed as a widely used new coercive weapon for interstate conflict. While one strand of the literature agrees with this statement, other works contend. Using new data on cyberattacks measured from Internet traffic, this paper tests these claims empirically by investigating whether sanctions lead to an increase in Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on the sender countries. Following previous literature, this increase may be due to targeted states that respond with DoS attacks to both the imposition and, even more so, the threat of sanctions as a coercive tool. However, I argue that an increase may also simply reflect DoS attacks launched to voice discontent. For the analysis, I run time series models from 2008 -- 2016 for the United States and the European Union as the most active sanctioning entities. The results show only some evidence for an increase of DoS attacks on the sender state when sanctions are imposed. Sanction threats appear to be unrelated to the development of DoS attacks. These findings support previous theoretical work that questions the coercive use of cyberattacks, suggesting that governments do not frequently use DoS attacks as a foreign policy instrument.

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“…For our analysis, we require fine-grained, systematically measured data on DoS attacks. Most of the existing research relies on English language newspaper articles only to code politically motivated DoS attacks (e.g., Asal et al 2016;Valeriano and Maness 2014). 3 The reliance on newspaper articles can be problematic due to potential reporting bias: First, only interesting attacks (e.g., those that are large and successful attacks) may be reported by the media, especially when the affected country is already in the center of attention (cf.…”

Section: New Data To Measure Dos Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some work in political science studies cyberattacks (of which DoS attacks only constitute one example) in interstate rivalries (Valeriano and Maness 2014). Asal et al (2016) explore country-specific factors that lead to an increased frequency of politically motivated DoS attacks. Most recently, Kostyuk and Zhukov (2019) investigate the interplay between DoS attacks and battlefield events in Ukraine and Syria.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

At Home and Abroad: The Use of Denial-of-service Attacks during Elections in Nondemocratic Regimes

Lutscher

Weidmann

Roberts

et al. 2019

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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In this article, we study the political use of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a particular form of cyberattack that disables web services by flooding them with high levels of data traffic. We argue that websites in nondemocratic regimes should be especially prone to this type of attack, particularly around political focal points such as elections. This is due to two mechanisms: governments employ DoS attacks to censor regime-threatening information, while at the same time, activists use DoS attacks as a tool to publicly undermine the government’s authority. We analyze these mechanisms by relying on measurements of DoS attacks based on large-scale Internet traffic data. Our results show that in authoritarian countries, elections indeed increase the number of DoS attacks. However, these attacks do not seem to be directed primarily against the country itself but rather against other states that serve as hosts for news websites from this country.

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Repression, Education, and Politically Motivated Cyberattacks

Cited by 17 publications

References 67 publications

How We Stopped Worrying about Cyber Doom and Started Collecting Data

How We Stopped Worrying about Cyber Doom and Started Collecting Data

Digital Retaliation? Denial-of-Service Attacks After Sanction Events

At Home and Abroad: The Use of Denial-of-service Attacks during Elections in Nondemocratic Regimes

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