with support from
Belligerents: Persons, states, or groups engaged in war or conflict.
Civil–military coordination: Dialogue and interaction between military and civilian agencies, including in the government, private, and nongovernmental sectors, to facilitate efficient and effective processes.
Collective defense: The idea that an attack against one ally is considered an attack against all allies; the concept is enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which formed NATO.
Content moderation: The process of detecting, removing, and otherwise responding to offensive or objectionable contributions on a platform.
Critical infrastructure: Assets, networks, and systems vital to the functioning of society, including for transportation, water, food, health, energy, information, and communication.
Cyber attribution: The process of identifying and disclosing responsibility for malicious cyber operations.
Cyber resilience: The ability to resist, withstand, and recover from malicious cyber activity.
Deepfake: An image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.
Deterrence and defense: The strategy of preventing attacks coupled with limiting or mitigating the damage incurred by them.
Deterrence by denial: Persuading an adversary not to attack by convincing them that an attack will not achieve their intended goal.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS): A cyberattack that targets websites and servers by flooding a site with errant traffic, resulting in poor website functionality or knocking it offline altogether.
Dual-use technologies: Products that have a primary commercial application but also have the potential to be weaponized or used for military applications.
Foreign influence operations: Covert actions by foreign governments to influence another country’s political sentiment or public discourse.
“Gray zone” tactics: The acts of state parties to a dispute maintaining high-level diplomatic relations while interacting antagonistically below the threshold of war.
Hack-and-leak operations: Incidents of data theft followed by the leaking of that information to the public.
Hybrid warfare: The use of nonmilitary tactics alongside conventional kinetic warfare to achieve foreign policy goals.
Information operations: Also known as influence operations, the collection and dissemination of information and propaganda about an adversary to advance strategic geopolitical goals.
International norms: Widely shared expectations about what constitutes appropriate behavior among governments and certain nonstate actors at the international level.
Kinetic warfare: Traditional military action that includes lethal force.
Multilateral institution: An organization of three or more states working together on issues of common interest, for example, the United Nations and NATO.
Multisector collaboration: Action and efforts across a range of international actors on a shared goal, such as cultivating and bolstering cyber resilience through technical, financial, diplomatic, and legal avenues.
Proxy warfare: A mode of war in which states with limited direct involvement in hostilities support or direct another state or party to the conflict.
Rome Statute: The treaty that created the International Criminal Court and defined the four most serious crimes under international law: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.
Rules of engagement: Directives that delineate when, where, how, and against whom military force may be used in a conflict.
Source code: The fundamental list of commands underlying a computer program.
Technical attribution: Using digital forensic tools to ascertain which software and hardware were used in a cyberattack.
Threat actor: Any organization, person, or group that directs an attack in cyberspace to cause harm against a specific target, including state and nonstate entities.
Dr. Cordula Droege
Keeping Civilians Off-Limits in Present and Future Wars
Civilians must be protected from—and should not participate in—military cyber operations.
Karim A.A. Khan KC
Technology Will Not Exceed Our Humanity
We must renew our efforts to ensure that justice is not outpaced by the changing character of war.
Clint Watts
How Russia Makes Friends and Influences Audiences in Latin America
Russia’s success in establishing and maintaining a media foothold in Latin America highlights how important worldwide influence campaigns are to hybrid warfare.
Shelley McKinley
Developers Collaborate to Secure Software Ecosystem Amid Digital Threats
The war in Ukraine has shown that the tech industry has a meaningful role to play in enabling developers to strengthen defenses from cyberattacks.
David Agranovich
Detect, Disrupt, Deter: The Multistakeholder Threat-Disruption Model
The tech industry was first to push back as cyber mercenaries launched influence operations, malware development, and espionage, but governments are catching up.
David van Weel
A Proactive Approach to the Cyber Domain Strengthens NATO’s Deterrence and Defense Posture
Responding to the growing threat of hostile cyber operations requires a mindset shift toward greater civilian–military cooperation as well as more engagement with the private sector.
Stéphane Duguin
Tracing Cyberattacks in Times of Conflict: The Hard Path to Cyber Peace
Transparency and rigorous data collection are essential to credibly tracking cyber operations during the Russia–Ukraine war— as are being neutral and facilitating redress for all victims.
Chris Inglis
Cyber Attribution Is Critical to Ensuring Accountability
As cyberattacks become increasingly common, calling out perpetrators is fundamental to imposing sanctions and taking countermeasures.
Comfort Ero
Tech Companies Are Fighting for Ukraine. But Will They Help Save Lives in Other Global Conflicts?
Social networks and tech corporations have become significant actors in hybrid warfare, but much work is needed to determine how they can contribute to the broader efforts of preventing and resolving deadly conflicts.
Mykhailo Fedorov
Lessons from Ukraine in the Heat of an Ongoing Hybrid War
Ukraine has been building up its digital defense for the past decade—preparation that is now paying off.
Annie Fixler
Cyber Resilience Helps Democracies Prevail Against Authoritarian Disinformation Campaigns
The key is to mitigate attacks on communications systems and unmask attempts to corrupt the information environment.
Tom Burt
The Face of Modern Hybrid Warfare
Russia has aligned its cyber, military, and information operations in an unprecedented campaign.