Cashing in on Cyberpower: How Interdependent Actors Seek Economic Outcomes in a Digital World

As the world has become increasingly digitally interconnected, military leaders and other actors are ditching symmetric power strategies in favor of cyberstrategies. Cyberpower enables actors to change actual economic outcomes without the massive resource investment required for military force deployments. Cashing In on Cyberpower addresses the question, Why and to what end are state and nonstate actors using cybertools to influence economic outcomes? The most devastating uses of cyberpower can include intellectual property theft, espionage to uncover carefully planned trade strategies, and outright market manipulation through resource and currency values. Offering eight hypotheses to address this central question, Mark T. Peters II considers every major cyberattack (almost two hundred) over the past ten years, providing both a quick reference and a comparative analysis. He also develops new case studies depicting the 2010 intellectual property theft of a gold-detector design from the Australian Codan corporation, the 2012 trade negotiation espionage in the Japanese Trans-Pacific Partnership preparations, and the 2015 cyberattacks on Ukrainian SCADA systems. All these hypotheses combine to identify new data and provide a concrete baseline of how leaders use cybermeans to achieve economic outcomes.  

Table of Contents:
List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments 1. Entering the Cyber Commons Problem Research Question Interdependence and Power Method Development Cyber Application and Case Studies Summary 2. Interdependence Why Use Interdependence Theory? Interdependent Characteristics of the Virtual State Defining Interdependent Cyberspace Cyber Operations Summary 3. Power Types of Power Power Application Power through Economic Cyber Influences Summary 4. Method Development Method Types Describing the Data Sources Categorizing Cyber Events Case Study Guideline Summary 5. Cyber Applications Application in Practice Deciphering the Data Evaluating the First Four Hypotheses Summary 6. Case Study Analysis Deciphering Events through Narrative Linkages Japanese Government Case: Economic Espionage Ukrainian Power Grid Case: Economic Cyberattack Codan Case: Intellectual Property Theft Evaluating the Economic Hypotheses (H5, H6, H7, H8)  Summary 7. Framing Future Channels Linking Hypotheses to the Research Question Future Applications Final Thoughts Appendix: Cyber Events Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Mark T. Peters II is assigned to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. As a career U.S. Air Force intelligence officer and master cyberspace operator, he previously served as squadron commander for the Eighteenth Intelligence Squadron, a space intelligence unit. Peters has a doctorate in strategic studies and more than twenty years of military and intelligence experience.