Article in FutureGov Magazine

I recently wrote an article for FutureGov Magazine about the events in Estonia in 2007. Although my intent was to tone down the hype surrounding the incident, the final "independent" editing process managed to come up with a intro paragraph about "cyber war", even though I had specifically avoided this term in the article itself. I guess that is the risk one takes with media.

The article is available in the August-September issue [large pdf!], on pages 70-72.

Article in Akadeemia

One of my articles (Conflicts in the information age - cyber attacks and the citizen society) was published in the Estonian academic journal called Akadeemia (2009, nr 9, Special Edition on War and Peace) a few days ago.

In the article, I revisit the own forces/hired guns/volunteers categories and focus on the latter. I try to explain some interesting aspects of using volunteers, such as the parallel rise in crime and the need to "exercise" the volunteers regularly. I also try to look at why ordinary people from the street may become belligerents in cyber space, specifically addressing radicalization through Internet and formulation of cyber tribes. I end the article with a positive note, that volunteers can be harnessed for good, as well as evil. Consider, for example, defensive volunteer organizations, such as the WARP network in UK. In addition, I touch upon the personal responsibility of today's netizens - we all have a part to play in developing a safer cyber society.

Paper on Cyber Society

I co-authored a paper with Peeter Lorents and Raul Rikk that was published in the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, San Diego, in July. You can also find the paper in LNCS 5623, pp. 180-186.

The paper is titled Cyber Society and Cooperative Cyber Defence. In it, we explore the concept of cyber society, which we define as "a society where computerized information transfer and information processing is (near) ubiquitous and where the normal functioning of this society is severely degraded or altogether impossible if the computerized systems no longer function correctly."

We then examine Estonia as an early form of a cyber society and illustrate it's potential vulnerabilities with the events of April-May 2007. We conclude the paper with the foundations behind the establishment of the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.

This was my first co-authored paper and as such a new experience. One of the problems of having multiple authors is to write a consistent paper - something that could be improved in this case. However, I think it does convey the ideas that we wanted.