Pride & Prejudice: Vanity in State-nexus Cyber Operations

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Presented at CyberWarCon 2019 by

Alex Kichen

State-nexus cyberspace attack and information operations can showcase how classically emotional motives, namely national pride and leadership vanity, can play an outsized role in operation formulation and execution. This contrasts with the presumption that, typically, state-nexus operations have objectives that would be considered dispassionate and rational in atraditional strategic sense. Among the many dynamics affecting the institutions likely conducting state-nexus operations, national pride and leadership vanity are among the most volatile and likely to drive strategically irrational actions that may even end up being counterproductive for the initiating state.