Offensive Cyber Actors, Behavior, and Risk

The report analyzes Russia’s continuous assaults against the Ukrainian information environment, and examines how Russian offensives and Ukrainian defense both move through this largely privately owned and operated environment. The report highlights key questions that must emerge around the growing role that private companies play in conflict.

In Myanmar, cybercrime has become an effective vehicle through which nonstate actors can fund and perpetuate conflict.

The Mythical Beasts project pulls back the curtain on the connections between 435 entities across forty-two countries in the global spyware market.

Mythical Beasts and Where to Find Them: Mapping the Global Spyware Market and its Threats to National Security and Human Rights is concerned with the commercial market for spyware and provides data on market participants.

The Intellexa Consortium is a complex web of holding companies and vendors for spyware and related services. The Consortium represents a compelling example of spyware vendors in the context of the market in which they operate—one which helps facilitate the commercial sale of software driving both human rights and national security risk.

The United States and its allies can do more to improve their position on spyware. Further policy action should, through greater collaboration with marketplace operators and allies and partners, work on furthering the development of norms and common understanding of what spyware can and cannot be used for.

This issue brief analyzes the range of Russian government’s involvement with different actors in the large, complex, and often opaque cyber web, as well as the risks and benefits the Kremlin perceives or gets from leveraging actors in this group. The issue brief concludes with three takeaways and actions for policymakers in the United States, as well as in allied and partner countries.

Between 2016 and 2019, cybercriminals shifted from automated ransomware campaigns that emphasized scale to targeted extortion operations against organizations. This adaption made ransomware more disruptive and more profitable, culminating in the 2021 surge in ransomware. Though the US government has devoted more attention to ransomware since 2021, ransomware remains a significant and long-term threat to the US economy.

“America the Unready: Viking Age lessons for ransomware” explores the rising tide of ransomware and presents three lessons that the US Government can learn from the English Viking Age about combating persistent, distributed threats through strengthening collective resilience and defense.