Resilience to cyber-enabled foreign interference: citizen understanding and threat perceptions

ABSTRACT

Cyber-enabled foreign interference remains a key threat to many advanced industrial countries. In many cases, the security response has been to build “resilience” – cyber, national and, increasingly, democratic resilience – in line with whole-of-government and whole-of-society strategies. However, many of these securitised responses are “top-down” and elite driven. These resilience agendas do not pay sufficient attention to the views, concerns and threat-perceptions of citizens, potentially undermining their efficacy. In this article, we focus on the Australian case to better understand how citizen cyber skills, threat awareness, and perceptions of institutional capacity can inform democratic resilience to evolving cyber and information risks. We find strong evidence of a clear gap between citizen views and the securitised responses of governments in dealing with cyber-enabled foreign interference. A further issue from the Australian case is that citizens are framed as a passive strategic resource, rather than conceived of as a potentially substantive partner in a “joined-up” response.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• foreign interference
• cyber-enabled threats

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Defence, Australian Government [Strategic Policy Grant - 2020-106-067].

Notes on contributors

Rob Manwaring

Dr Rob Manwaring is an Associate Professor at Flinders University. His research interests include, democracy and political parties

Josh Holloway

Dr Josh Holloway is a research associate at Flinders, and he researches into democracy, politicla parties and resilience