Offensive Cyber Working Group

We are pleased to welcome Dr Briant to talk about “Warfare and Deception: Where will Cyber meet Psych?” which is happening Wednesday 31 March 2021 (5pm BST).

Sign up: https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2VB9tBfLRiq9AjJMbZ4I3A

Whether or not local and foreign influence operations put Trump in power, accelerated cyber attacks and information warfare during the US election in 2016 had a profound and deliberate psychological affect. As a result, the US launched its own pre-emptive and aggressive cyber strategy seeking to deter future hacks. While Offensive Cyber is normally defined in terms of hardware – computer network attacks with impacts on physical hardware and software manipulation, Dr Briant explains and emphasises the increasing importance of dual impacts on the human ‘infrastructure’ of our minds, which marked the events of 2016. The psychological impacts of Offensive Cyber and how these are mitigated or influenced should be more integral conceptually, suggesting a possible broadening of the concept. Dr Briant predicts that Western governments will recognise increasingly that their own Offensive Cyber outcomes rest on their accompanying activities in the psychological domain and will increase use of information operations around such attacks. It is essential that scholars in the related disciplines discuss, anticipate and better understand how influence and offensive cyber interact addressing their ethical and legal implications together.