The 2014 cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment is an example of a disruptive event where a nation state utilized cyber tools in order to coerce a target into changing their course of action. Cyber attacks, something that might be perceived as a looming futuristic threat, became reality for Sony and its employees under the course of a few months in late 2014. The coercer’s attempt to change the behavior of the company eventually failed and North Korea who was attributed as coercer was imposed with new sanctions. This paper takes on the task of evaluating the Sony case against both the traditional theory of coercion and specific factors of cyber coercion in order to determine how the failure can be explained. The findings implicate that the failure can be explained by the traditional theory but needs to be complemented with the specifics of cyber coercion due to the difficulties in assessing the credibility of cyber attacks. Further studies are advised in the area of cyber coercion and a comparative approach would do particularly well in assessing causal explanations in a more comprehensive way.

This paper aims to describe and explain the Russian use of cyberattacks in the Ukrainian conflict. Two major cyber events, BlackEnergy in 2015 and NotPetya in 2017, are analysed by the theoretical framework of coercive diplomacy developed by Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, as well as the theory of cyber coercion made by Daniel R. Flemming and Neil C. Rowe. This paper concludes that the Russian use of cyberattacks could be understood as an extension of their already widespread practice of coercive diplomacy as a foreign policy tool. The cyberattacks were developed to pressure the Ukrainian energy and economic sector, through destabilisation of the economic powerbase and the country as a whole. The cyber offenses are developed to push the Ukrainian politics from western influence back towards the Russian political orbit. This due to the political, economic, and power interests Russia finds in the post-soviet state of Ukraine.

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