Cyberspace has penetrated every facet of society's life and the nation's security. It entangled the whole world together, providing exceptional opportunities and threats. One of these threats is a new kind of warfare known as Hybrid warfare; Its nature is to deploy all unconventional means to achieve objectives given by its user. Additionally, means used in cyberspace and capabilities it offers have a complementary effect on Hybrid warfare strategies creating a positive feedback loop. Targets of this new type of warfare are usually Western democracies or nations affiliated with them. The western open approach to cyberspace proved to be readily exploitable by malicious actors. These actors are nations such as Russia or China. However, private entities or individuals have, too, proved to be capable of employing Hybrid tactics. These tactics employed are cyberattacks, data gathering and exploitation, and disinformation. There is a case period for each of them: Cyberattacks during 2007 Estonia, Data gathering and exploitation, the Chinese model and its dissemination, and disinformation throughout the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Each case will attempt to examine the effects of Cyberspace on Hybrid warfare; Which proved to be a complementary effect, cyberspace amplifying Hybrid warfare and providing it...

There is an increasing gap between the progress of technological systems and the successful exploitation of these systems through cyber-attack. Whilst the mechanism and scope of cyberspace is progressing with each passing day, risk factors and the ability to process the required amount of data from cyberspace efficiently are proving to be major obstacles to achieving desired outcomes from cyber operations. This, coupled with the dramatic increase in the numbers of cyber attackers, who are constantly producing new ways of attacking and paralysing cyber systems for political or financial gain, is a critical issue for countries that have linked their major infrastructures with Internet applications. The defensive methods currently applied to counter these evolving attacks are no longer sufficient, due to their preventive and reactive nature. This research has developed a new Active Situational Awareness theoretical model for Active Defence that aims to enhance the agility and quality of cyber situational awareness in organisations in order to counter cyber attacks. Situational Awareness (SA) is a crucial component in every organisation. It helps in the assessment of an immediate situation in relation to the environment. Current SA models adopt a reactive attitude, which responds to events and works in passive manner to any progressing enemy cyber attack. This creates a defensive mind-set and consequently influences the operator to process and utilise knowledge only within the concept of attack prevention. Thus, one can assume that operators will only gather certain knowledge after the occurrence of an attack, instead of actively searching for new intelligence to create new knowledge about the cyber attack before it takes place. This research study introduces a new approach that incorporates an Active Defence posture; namely, a ‘winning attitude’ that conforms to the military stratagems of Sun Tzu, where operators always engage attackers directly in order to create new knowledge in an agile manner by deploying active intelligence-gathering techniques to inform active defence postures in cyberspace. This also allows the system being protected to remain one step ahead of the attackers to ultimately defeat them and thwart any costly attacks. To back these statements, this study issued a survey to 200 cyber defence and security experts in order to collect data on their opinions concerning the current state of Active SA. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was then employed to analyse the data gathered from the survey. The results of the analysis revealed significant importance of Active Offensive Intelligence gathering in enhancing Cyber SA. The SEM showed there is a significant impact on SA Agility and Quality from Active Intelligence gathering activities. Further to this, the SEM results informed the design of the serious gaming environments utilised in this research to verify the SEM causality model. Also, the SEM informed the design of a SA assessment metric, where a behavioural anchor rating scale was used along with ground truth to measure participant SA performance. The results of this experiment revealed that there was 2 times better enhancement in cyber Situational awareness among those who did utilise active measures compared with participants who did not which mean almost double and this shows the importance of offensive intelligence gathering in enhancing cyber SA and speed up defender decision making and OODA loop. This research provided for the first time a novel theory for active cyber SA that is aligned with military doctrine. Also, a novel assessment framework and approaches for evaluating and quantifying cyber SA performance was developed in this research study. Finally, a serious gaming environment was developed for this research and used to evaluate the active SA theory which has an impact on training, techniques and practice Deception utilisation by Active groups revealed the importance of having deception capabilities as part of active tools that help operators to understand attackers’ intent and motive, and give operators more time to control the impact of cyber attacks. However, incorrect utilisation of deception capabilities during the experiment led operators to lose control over cyber attacks. Active defence is required for future cyber security. However, this trend towards the militarisation of cyberspace demands new or updated laws and regulations at an international level. Active intelligence methods define the principal capability at the core of the new active situational awareness model order in to deliver enhanced agility and quality in cyber SA.

LL.M. (International Law) / Please refer to full text to view abstract.

War is gendered. The scholarship of gender and war is comprehensive and multi-layered, yet there seems to be some difficulty to keep up with the new developments in technology and its involvement in warfare. It was only until a few years ago that a new method of warfare - cyber warfare, a form of hybrid warfare, emerged and got the spotlight in the discussions on new methods of warfare. However, as the literature is growing, and international organisations are producing policy and strategy documents on cyber warfare, there seems to be a research gap on the relation between gender and cyber warfare, more specifically the gendered aspects of cyber warfare. This thesis attempts to fill that research gap and intends to answer how cyber warfare may be gendered. This is be done by generally looking at the literature of “Gender and War” and “Gender and Cyber”, and Gunneriusson and Ottis (2013) categorisation of how cyberspace is used in military operations from a hybrid warfare perspective. Gunneriusson and Otitis’s categorisation focus on inter alia cyber-attacks on non-military targets, and the use of propaganda. The overview of the research on gender and cyber focus on the workforce within cyber related sectors and gender-based violence, and the overview of research on gender and war brings up numerous examples of the nexus between gender and war.  Based on the overview of the two fields of research along with Gunneriusson and Ottis categorisation this thesis comes to the conclusion that cyber warfare can be gendered. The purpose of the examples of cyber-attacks are the same when same attacks are conducted offline and these types of attack offline have the same effect online. The difference is that an attack through the cyberspace intensifies the consequences in comparison to when these same methods were used in other domains.

Power grids are regarded as significant military targets and have been targeted with kinetic attacks in previous military operations. These attacks resulted in significant levels of physical destruction, which, in the long-term, both undermined the success of the operations and caused severe adverse effects on the human terrain. Since power grids have grown as a result of introducing advanced technologies, they have also become more dependent upon cyberspace and are thus exposed to cyber attacks. Since cyber attacks have demonstrated the ability to creating physical/nonphysical effects with surgical precision, they have emerged as a credible option for disrupting power operations for a reasonable duration. However, these types of attacks sometimes require complex coordination with entities from distinct fields for efficient planning; a lack of awareness of the global picture about how to conduct these attacks could result in miscalculations and cause a repeat of the same past failures. Motivated by this fact, this thesis holistically analyzes the steps involved in conducting cyber attacks on power grids for the purpose of gaining military superiority and provides a comparison for the capabilities, challenges, and opportunities of kinetic and cyber attacks. For the purpose of creating a comprehensive framework for this thesis, the following considerations have been incorporated: the analyses of goals, targets, solutions, and effects of previous military operations; the physical and cyber infrastructures of power grids; and the features, challenges, and opportunities of cyber attacks. To present the findings, this document has adopted a novel military methodology for both the cyber attack analysis and the comparison of the means. / Master of Science

O presente artigo tem por objetivo demonstrar a importância do meio físico como variável explicativa fundamental para o estudo da ciberguerra. O argumento central desenvolvido afirma que o transporte efetivo de informações no ciberespaço durante a guerra depende da posse de ativos estratégicos que garantam a interconexão entre dispositivos eletrônicos por meio de redes resilientes e seguras, e que a posse, a localização e o controle desses ativos é condição prévia e necessária para a consecução de uma estratégia de defesa cibernética. A partir de um arcabouço teórico clausewitziano e de uma análise de redes em camadas, esse artigo conclui que tanto no plano estratégico (ativos nacionais) quanto no plano operacional e tático (redes militares críticas) o acesso e a livre movimentação no ciberespaço é fortemente dependente do meio físico. / This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of the physical medium as a key explanatory variable for the study of cyberwar. The central argument defends that the effective transport of information in cyberspace during war depends on the possession of strategic assets to ensure the connection between electronic devices via resilient and secure networks, and that the ownership, location and control of these assets is a prior and necessary condition to the achievement of a cyber defense strategy. From a Clausewitzian theoretical framework, and through an analysis of layered network architecture, this paper concludes that in both strategic (domestic assets) and operational and tactical (critical military networks) levels the access and unrestricted movement in cyberspace depends greatly on the physical medium.

O presente artigo tem por objetivo demonstrar a importância do meio físico como variável explicativa fundamental para o estudo da ciberguerra. O argumento central desenvolvido afirma que o transporte efetivo de informações no ciberespaço durante a guerra depende da posse de ativos estratégicos que garantam a interconexão entre dispositivos eletrônicos por meio de redes resilientes e seguras, e que a posse, a localização e o controle desses ativos é condição prévia e necessária para a consecução de uma estratégia de defesa cibernética. A partir de um arcabouço teórico clausewitziano e de uma análise de redes em camadas, esse artigo conclui que tanto no plano estratégico (ativos nacionais) quanto no plano operacional e tático (redes militares críticas) o acesso e a livre movimentação no ciberespaço é fortemente dependente do meio físico. / This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of the physical medium as a key explanatory variable for the study of cyberwar. The central argument defends that the effective transport of information in cyberspace during war depends on the possession of strategic assets to ensure the connection between electronic devices via resilient and secure networks, and that the ownership, location and control of these assets is a prior and necessary condition to the achievement of a cyber defense strategy. From a Clausewitzian theoretical framework, and through an analysis of layered network architecture, this paper concludes that in both strategic (domestic assets) and operational and tactical (critical military networks) levels the access and unrestricted movement in cyberspace depends greatly on the physical medium.

O presente artigo tem por objetivo demonstrar a importância do meio físico como variável explicativa fundamental para o estudo da ciberguerra. O argumento central desenvolvido afirma que o transporte efetivo de informações no ciberespaço durante a guerra depende da posse de ativos estratégicos que garantam a interconexão entre dispositivos eletrônicos por meio de redes resilientes e seguras, e que a posse, a localização e o controle desses ativos é condição prévia e necessária para a consecução de uma estratégia de defesa cibernética. A partir de um arcabouço teórico clausewitziano e de uma análise de redes em camadas, esse artigo conclui que tanto no plano estratégico (ativos nacionais) quanto no plano operacional e tático (redes militares críticas) o acesso e a livre movimentação no ciberespaço é fortemente dependente do meio físico. / This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of the physical medium as a key explanatory variable for the study of cyberwar. The central argument defends that the effective transport of information in cyberspace during war depends on the possession of strategic assets to ensure the connection between electronic devices via resilient and secure networks, and that the ownership, location and control of these assets is a prior and necessary condition to the achievement of a cyber defense strategy. From a Clausewitzian theoretical framework, and through an analysis of layered network architecture, this paper concludes that in both strategic (domestic assets) and operational and tactical (critical military networks) levels the access and unrestricted movement in cyberspace depends greatly on the physical medium.

The ever-growing interconnectivity of industry and infrastructure through cyberspace has increased their vulnerability to cyber attack. The lack of any formal codification of cyber warfare has led to the development of contradictory state practices and disagreement as to the legal standing of cyber warfare, resulting in an increased risk of damage to property and loss of life. Using the just war theory as a foundation, the research questions asked at the point at which cyber attacks meet the definition of use of force or armed attack under international law and what impediments currently exist in the development of legal limitations on cyber warfare. The research design was based on using the Delphi technique with 18 scholars in the fields of cyber warfare and international law for 3 rounds of questioning to reach a consensus of opinion. The study employed qualitative content analysis of survey questions during the first round of inquiry in order to create the questions for the 2 subsequent rounds. The first round of inquiry consisted of a questionnaire composed of 9 open-ended questions. These data were inductively coded to identify themes for the subsequent questionnaires that consisted of 42 questions that allowed the participants to rank their responses on a Likert-type scale and contextualize them using written responses. Participants agreed that a computer attack is comparable to the use of force or armed attack under international law, but fell short of clearly defining the legal boundaries of cyber warfare. This study contributes to social change by providing informed opinions by experts about necessary legal reforms and, therefore, provides a basis for greater legal protections for life and property.

The introduction of social media platforms influenced the social dynamics by changing the way individuals are exposed to information. The straightforwardness of social media communication resulted in an overwhelming amount of information for users, and the variety of sources of the information is limiting users’ ability to assess what information is genuine and what is disinformation. Exploiting this shift in societal functioning, conspiracy theories have taken advantage of social media's reach to undermine the foundations of societies. One such theory, QAnon, which revolves around a fantastical narrative of a ruling satanic cabal exploiting children, has transitioned from the obscure corners of cyberspace to become a topic of mainstream media, courtesy of social media algorithms, journalistic interest, and opportunistic politicians. The impact of the QAnon discourse resulted in violent acts for some of the followers, culminating in the U.S. Capitol storming. This act provoked immense ban activity by major social media networks. With the passage of time, interest in QAnon has waned considerably. Thus, through a survey and thematic and content analysis, this research aims to assess and answer the following research questions: Where are QAnon conspiracy theory groups present in social media networks? and What are the main discussion themes and conspiracy theory targets? two years after the “storm“ incident. Gab, Telegram and Rumble are the social media platforms that have the most QAnon followers and discussions. An analysis confirmed that the discourse mainly concentrates around politics and conspiracy theories, with Donald Trump being the individual whose activities occupy the attention of most of the discussion topics. Calls for violence are rare, mostly in the form of predicting military coups or military courts, the QAnon followers’ narrative that has already been seen. In the case of QAnon, disinformation remains an attack vector in cyber warfare which underscores the need for further analysis into the development and influence the theory has towards upcoming major political events.