RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

> … Loading, 30 seconds until player two enters the game I appear to be in some sort of train carriage. I look down. My shoes have morphed into some rather fetching cowboy boots, my hands are clad in leather gauntlet-style gloves. > … 15 seconds until player two enters the game Furiously I attempt to discern how to move, hesitantly waddling forward, wary of my unfamiliar surroundings. > … 5 seconds until player two enters the game I turn to face the door of the carriage. > … Start game The door violently swings open and I am met with a veritable blizzard. The scene clears. I am under a moonlit sky. I am on a moving train. Up ahead there is movement. This must be my opponent – the much-vaunted player two. I look down to my hand. I am holding a pistol, a shiny silver pistol. I lift my hand and take aim, expecting a flurry of fire to down my adversary. But my shiny silver sidearm does not flurry. Instead, what can only be described as a slow moving, fluorescent blue orb emerge...

When was the first cyberattack? Your answer to that question might depend on how you define the term ‘cyberattack’. It also might depend on how far you think the public record is complete in this area. It was this knotty tangle of conceptual disputes, secrets, and mysteries that participants sought to address at a recent workshop organised by the University of Warwick: ‘Cyberattacks and covert strategies in perspective: the long history of the future’. The workshop brought together academics from intelligence studies and history, cybersecurity and cyber conflict studies, and security studies more broadly. Among other themes, the panels at the event examined the early roots of state cyber operations, focusing primarily on the US and the UK. As the workshop organisers noted, it is important that academics looking at cyber operations not succumb to the ‘shock of the new’. The means of a state cyber espionage operation may be new, but espionage, deception, and subversion are all very old. ...