Tim Maurer on 'Cyber Mercenaries'
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2018
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The idea of proxy conflict dates to the Cold War and earlier, but Tim Maurer’s new book “Cyber Mercenaries: The State, Hackers, and Power” makes one of the first forays into proxy conflict in cyberspace. Last week, Maurer sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes at the Hoover Book Soiree to talk about the book. They discussed Maurer’s typology of how states like the United States, Syria, Russia and China differ in their use of cyber proxies and the challenges they pose to attribution and accountability.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | Geography doesn't really matter. |
| 0:35.3 | You can have these hackers operate from a third country, you can have them operate from |
| 0:40.4 | the country where the masters are actually in the capital. |
| 0:43.2 | And one of the questions I have is we know attribution has been getting a lot better. |
| 0:48.4 | It's harder at least for the US government and some of the Western capitalists to figure |
| 0:52.6 | out who's actually behind a cyber attack. |
| 0:55.1 | If that happens, the actors who try to use them for plausible liability reasons might |
| 1:01.5 | either increase their technical sophistication to still hype their tracks or they might |
| 1:06.1 | be using different models for their proxy relationships where they might start placing |
| 1:10.8 | teams in third countries. |
| 1:12.4 | The fact that you had 70 Chinese nationals who were found in Nairobi, Kenya conducting |
| 1:17.7 | cyber crime and then being extradited to China. |
| 1:20.4 | Why were there in Kenya? |
| 1:21.7 | That might be a trend that I hope won't happen because it makes even how we address this |
| 1:26.4 | even more complex. |
| 1:27.8 | But could be a response to an enhanced attribution capability. |
| 1:31.7 | I'm Matthew Khan and you're listening to the LawFair podcast, April 10, 2018. |
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