Cyber Conflict: Disruption and Exploitation in the Digital Age

Abstract

In August of 1986, a former astronomer-turned-systems-administrator, on his second day on the job, attempted to determine what was causing a 75-cent discrepancy in a UNIX accounting system at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Over the course of the next ten months, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers would trace the anomaly to a hacker in Germany who was using computers to steal information from the United States and sell it to the Soviet Union’s KGB (Stoll 2005). This incident represents one of the earliest examples of cyber espionage and pioneered many of the tactics, techniques, and procedures used in cyber incident response actions today. More importantly, this event demonstrated the ability of nation-states or their proxies to leverage emerging network technologies to gather intelligence and to potentially disrupt the services and systems of competitor states. It was one of the groundbreaking events in a phenomenon we will collectively call ‘cyber conflict.’