Excerpts from a keynote by Lucas Kello, Author and Director of Oxford's Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research.
During Lucas Kello’s first year of his Ph.D. in international relations at Oxford University, Russia-based attackers launched a series of denial of service attacks against Estonia in response to that nation's removal of a Soviet war monument. This attack interrupted Estonia’s financial and government systems for three weeks.
Lucas was recruited by a friend to help write the world’s first public national cyber strategy, for the nation of Estonia, for free as a Ph.D. student.
Today, Kello is the Director of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, an Oxford-wide initiative sponsored by the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). He also is the author of Striking Back: The End of Peace in Cyberspace And How to Restore It.
Kello spoke recently at Rolls-Royce’s Cybersecurity Technology Research Network conference in Derby, U.K.
We’ve highlighted excerpts below.
Russia or China?
“When it comes to the use of computer technology for political and social disruption, I believe that Russia is at the top of the global game.”
Getting it Wrong
“How did we get [cyberattack deterrence] so wrong? Why is it that our political leaders keep on making noises about how significant information ops and hacks are for national security, for election security and the legitimacy of election outcomes, and yet we just haven't come up with a credible and effective toolkit to stop that stuff from happening.”
Getting it Right
“Let's convince [cyberattackers] that whatever material gains they think that they are gaining by hacking into election systems, conducting ransomware attacks against energy infrastructure and so forth, that those material gains are less than the expected material costs that ensue.”
“Unpeace”
“What is becoming an increasingly important reality is the phenomenon of what I call ‘unpeace.’” Faced with “the political, social, economic consequences of some of these major cyber incidents … it's wrong to think of this activity as somehow peaceful. It's also wrong to think about it as warlike. It is something distinctly new.”
Too late?
Were you hoping for optimism today? You came to the wrong church if that's what you were looking for. But I did not call [my] book ‘Letting Go.’ I called it ‘Striking Back,’ because I do think that despite the deep-seated problems with policy and strategy, the situation is not lost. We just need to do things differently.”
Among the ideas floated: Disabling the online censorship networks of our adversaries, which would allow their citizens to access Western news sources.