Cyber-attacks can roughly be grouped into two types: breaches to gather information (digital espionage), and attacks on foreign systems to block or damage adversaries’ networks, such as of governmental bodies, symbolic targets, and critical infrastructure. The cyber toolbox used to pursue geopolitical aims includes a wide range of instruments including those for surveillance, espionage, disinformation, or destructive attacks. As cyber threats and physical threats become indivisible, “cyber-geopolitics” is likely to be at the forefront of future geopolitical competition. Cyberspace - the global network of interconnected information technology including hardware, software, and information - is host to some of states’ greatest geopolitical weapons and vulnerabilities alike. With the digitalization of industries, geopolitics - the use of statecraft and assets to gain influence in international affairs - becomes increasingly detached from its original geographical framing.
EMPIRE AND ALLIES HACK 2013 FULL
Russian operations in the United States, France, and across Europe have put on full display the potential to wreak political havoc abroad with the help of the cyber toolbox. Most transatlantic debate about cybersecurity from a geopolitical angle has focused on Russia and its interference in Western elections.
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The proliferation of cyber weapons in the region and their use as geopolitical tools has the potential to further shake and unsettle regional crises and larger Western interests. Over the past few years, governments and non-state groups in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have gone to great lengths to build cyber capabilities. Geopolitics is at a critical inflection point where the cyber domain is becoming a principal frontline. Digital innovation offers political adversaries increasing opportunity to find vulnerabilities that have the potential to undo the capacities of a nation’s economic and military force. In the Middle East, global geopolitical trends tend to manifest themselves early, and intensely.
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and EU interests and put in question its regional security arrangements it also provided a glimpse of how the pursuit of expansive geopolitical ambitions by means of targeted cyber-attacks can generate conflict and trigger political landslides in the glimpse of an eye.
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The Qatar crisis not only escalated long-simmering tensions in a region key to U.S. Planting a seed of misinformation in a bed of long-standing tensions, a fake news story exploited regional polarization and anti-Iranian sentiments to rip the region further apart. Since a hack on a Qatari government website in June 2017 triggered the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) deepest diplomatic crisis since its inception, the Gulf states have been stepping up their efforts to enhance their cyber reach and keep up with the rapid strides of regional cyber powers Iran and Israel.