What is The Cyber Moonshot?
The Cyber Moonshot illustrates central cybersecurity themes through the lens of lovable characters living on an interstellar port on the Moon thousands of years in the future. This world, while similar to ours in many ways, is set in a slightly different ‘absurd’ universe where things that we usually refer to in the symbolic sense are made physical, personified, and a bit more comical. The absurdist takes on software supply chains, the cloud, phishing, and much more will highlight and magnify the cybersecurity lessons we need to learn in the real world and make these topics more accessible to a larger audience .
The central driver of this project is the belief that we can use fiction as a tool to build bridges, both to complex topics and to other communities. The Cyber Moonshot series is a project designed to make people laugh but it is also a key component in building a cybersecurity community that is connected and inspired.
Check out the latest episode of The Cyber Moonshot!
Episodes
Check out the audio dramatizations of each episode on
Apple Podcasts and Spotify!
Welcome to The Cyber Moonshot, brought to you by the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative.
We invite you to join us a few hundred years from now, in a quaint little food court on the surface of the moon. As we explore the lives and foibles of the lunar inhabitants, we will also explore the complexities and absurdities of cybersecurity. From software supply chains to smart homes to phishing, we will pull common cyber headaches and lessons away from the abstract or technical and firmly into a world where cats can sense trust and the cloud has a sentience of their own.
Before jumping feet first into this little universe we have dreamt up for you, yes just for you, you’re our favorite, I must confess that everything you will hear in the coming stories is almost entirely fictional. There are no coffee shops or cat cafés on the moon, though surely some hopeful billionaire somewhere is crafting cozy animal spacesuits for precisely that eventuality. I say “almost entirely fictional” because, as you know, even the most absurd stories contain little Kernels of Truth™. Sometimes it is the very ridiculousness of a narrative that highlights these truths most clearly. By spilling some ink on a page and borrowing just the smallest corner of your imagination, we hope to weave stories and real ideas together.
For more from The Cyber Moonshot engage with us on Twitter @CyberStatecraft and with #TheCyberMoonshot. Your ideas can help inform Moonshot adventures to come.
Episode One
Episode Two
Bonus Content
The Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, under the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), works at the nexus of geopolitics and cybersecurity to craft strategies to help shape the conduct of statecraft and to better inform and secure users of technology.