Conventional wisdom is the United States wields the most sophisticated offensive cyber operations capability in the world today. In the context of the so-called "big four" nation state adversaries, Russia is generally believed to be the most capable followed by DPRK and China. However, Eric Rosenbach, the Co-Director of Harvard’s Belfer Center, recently spoke with Cyberscoop and has basically laid that idea to rest, stipulating China is essentially neck-and-neck with the US:
Overall, China’s cyber power is only second to the U.S., according to the research, which was shared exclusively with CyberScoop. But the study also found that several countries that are not currently considered conventional cyber powers are rising on the world stage.
Measuring cyber power can often be a complex endeavor, as many details are tucked away in top secret government documents around the world or veiled diplomatic messages. The researchers involved in creating the framework, who hail from Google’s Threat Analysis Group and the U.K. government’s cyber policy team, set out to provide a metric that reveals a more realistic picture of the cybersecurity ecosystem.
The article is a good read, with a lot of obviously very thorough research done by Harvard. Some of the findings are hard to reconcile with my own experience working in the Asia-Pacific & Japan region, such as ranking Malaysia in the top ten, among others.
Measuring cyber power can often be a complex endeavor, as many details are tucked away in top secret government documents around the world or veiled diplomatic messages. The researchers involved in creating the framework, who hail from Google’s Threat Analysis Group and the U.K. government’s cyber policy team, set out to provide a metric that reveals a more realistic picture of the cybersecurity ecosystem.
Indeed.