A Political Economy of Digital Espionage

As nation-states increasingly rely on espionage in cyberspace to maintain their leverage, we discuss the evolution of espionage from traditional methods into the digital world. We discuss the individual political economies of nation-states with significant offensive cyber capabilities, and how they reflect on to espionage methods. Through a causative analysis, we chart the rise of private actors that nation-states rely on to facilitate digital espionage methodologies such as surveillance and hacking. We compare the change in digital espionage as a factor in, and as the result of, kinetic warfare. Through the network effects of the few private actors and their offensive tooling available to governments worldwide, we aim to answer the central question of the societal cost of digital espionage, in particular to democratic institutions such as the free press, and the private actors who profiteer from this cost.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.