We are pleased to announce the publication of the Summer 2022 special issue of the Cyber Defense Review, edited and curated through the Offensive Cyber Working Group. This project brought together various scholars and practitioners from across disciplines and perspectives to explore the contours of offensive cyber.
This project began in July 2021, with a online, closed workshop where 13 authors presented a range of short papers. This productive and lively event resulted in a number of authors wishing to pursue their work in a longer, more formal forum, resulting in this special issue in the Cyber Defense Review.
As co-leads, Andrew Dwyer and Amy Ertan, state in the introduction that the special issue “is an open invitation to deepen and extend the conversation. The Offensive Cyber Working Group—which we co-lead and under which these papers were curated—will continue to promote conversations on these themes and welcomes engagement from research and policy communities to do so.”
It is hoped that this special issue will continue the conversation and we would like to thank all authors, including those not within the special issue, who contributed and shared their work. You can find the links to all the papers below:
Dr. Andrew Dwyer and Dr. Amy Ertan (Durham University and Harvard’s Belfer Center) – “Introduction: An Offensive Future?”
Alicia Bates (King’s College London) – “Prepare and Prevent: Don’t Repair and Repent: The Role of Insurance in Offensive Cyber”
Matthias Dellago, Daniel Woods, and Andrew Simpson (University of Innsbruck and University of Oxford) – “Exploit Brokers and Offensive Cyber Operations”
Dr. Bryan Nakayama (Mount Holyoke College) – “Democracies and the Future of Offensive (Cyber-Enabled) Information Operations”
Ewan Lawson (UK Embassy, Vietnam) – “Between Two Stools: Military and Intelligence Organizations in the Conduct of Offensive Cyber Operations”
Dr. Nori Katagiri (Saint Louis University and Modern War Institute) – “Three Conditions for Cyber Countermeasures: Opportunities and Challenges of Active-Defense Operations”
Dr. Brandon Valeriano (Marine Corps University) – “The Failure of the Offense/Defense Balance in Cyber Security”
Dr. Joe Burton (University of St. Andrews)– “The Future of Cyber Conflict Studies: Cyber Subcultures and the Road to Interdisciplinarity”
Dr. Rod Thornton and Dr. Marina Miron (King’s College London) – “Winning Future Wars: Russian Offensive Cyber and Its Vital Importance in Moscow’s Strategic Thinking”
If you have ideas of how you would like to be involved with the OCWG – please do get in touch.
Offensive Cyber Working Group 
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