Cybersecurity For Defense Economists

Figures & data

Table 1. APT sponsors by total military expenditure.

Country	2019 Rank*
United States	1
China	2
India	3
Russia	4
United Kingdom	5
France	8
South Korea	10
Australia	12
Israel	13
Canada	14
Turkey	16
Iran	18
Colombia	38
North Korea	46
Georgia	110

*Source: U.S. State Department’s World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 2019 Report.

https://2017-2021.state.gov/world-military-expenditures-and-arms-transfers-2019/index.html

Table 2. Disinformation active measures.

Type	Source	Content	Examples
Seeding or Conditioning	Fake	Accurate	Council for Cultural Freedom (CIA Operation QKOPERA). CyberCaliphate fake ISIS site release of hard to find and stolen documents. DCLeaks website release of DNC/Clinton campaign documents.
Post-Truth Signal Inversion	Fake	False or Exaggerated	Troll farms (Internet Research Agency ‘sockpuppets,’ 50-Cent Army ‘harmonizers’). Fake (verifiably untrue) News. Social Media Bots.
Forgery	Fake	Inaccurate, but close. Plausible	Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Tsarist/Soviet fake Jewish plot for world dominance). Steele Dossier/Alpha Bank documents given to FBI. Deep Fakes (GAN-based†).
Lies	True	False	Iraqi WMDs.‡ True #SyrianGasAttack hashtag versus false #SyrianHoax one. Alternative Chinese versions of Covid ground zero.
Leaking Stolen Documents (Doxing*)	True	Accurate	WikiLeaks: Manning & Snowden. Panama Papers. GRU leaks of World Doping Agency’s testing results on non-Russian athletes.
Whistleblowing	True	Accurate	Pentagon Papers. NATO plans for neutron bomb deployment. WikiLeaks: academic journals’ editorial suppression of research contrary to climate change, Saudi Cables.

* Leaking information online is called ‘doxing.’

† GAN = General Adversarial Network, a form of neural network deep learning.

‡ Competing claims include: Human intelligence source (Curveball) lied to handlers; U.S. Intelligence lied to U.S. decision makers; the U.S. lied to the UN; Saddam purposefully maintained ambiguity to keep his enemies off guard; Saddam destroyed the evidence that he destroyed WMDs because he denied having them in the first place.

Table 3. Cybersecurity and defense economics commonalities.

Commonality		Examples
		Defense Economics	Cybersecurity
Malicious Actors		Opposing Forces, Terrorists, Insurgents, Guerrillas	Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), eCrime, Insiders, Hacktivists, Hackers
Behavior		(Boundedly) Rational Implicit/Social Preferences	Honest Malicious (Faulty, Byzantine)
Arena		Battlespaces	ICT Platforms, Critical Infrastructure
Commons		Land, Air, Sea, Space	Cyberspace, IoT for DDoS
Public Good Contribution Aggregator	Summation	Peacekeeping Troops	Attack Surface
	Best Shot	Proactive Counterterrorism	Parallel Network
	Weakest Link	Perimeter Defense	Serial Network, Public Key Infrastructure
Externalities	Positive	Economic Growth	Cybersecurity Information Sharing
	Negative	Defensive Counterterrorism	Firewalls
Deterrence	Defensive Measures	ABMs, Star Wars, Arm’s Control	Kill Chains, Resilience, Zero-Trust
	Credible Threats	Mutually Assured Destruction	(Hybrid) Cost Imposition
Interdependent Security		Airlines	Networks, Cloud Services
Disinformation		False Flag	Deep Fake
Cryptography		Differing Computational Capacity	Secret/Secure Communication
Efficiency Measure		Pareto Efficiency	Price of Anarchy

U.S. State Department 2019. “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 2019 Report.” https://2017-2021.state.gov/world-military-expenditures-and-arms-transfers-2019/index.html

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