The Hidden Geopolitics of Cyberspace

USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the USC Master’s in Public Diplomacy Program, and the USC Annenberg School for Communication was pleased to host Dr. Ronald Deibert. Professor Deibert is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto.

Crime and espionage form a dark underworld of cyberspace. Whereas crime is usually the first to seek out new opportunities and methods, espionage usually follows in its wake, borrowing techniques and tradecraft. As our everyday lives move online, criminals and spies have migrated to this domain. They leverage complex, adaptive attack techniques to take advantage of the fissures that have emerged in an era where “e” is everything. Every new software, social networking site, cloud-computing system, or web-hosting service represents opportunities for the predatory criminal ecosystem to subvert, adapt, and exploit. Drawing from the research activities of the Citizen Lab, and in particular the Tracking Ghostnet and Shadows in the Cloud report, Deibert provided an overview of the hidden geopolitics of cyberspace, with a focus on the emerging ecosystem of crime and espionage.