Viola Fee Dreikhausen, Andrea Salvi
On 5 October 2023, a group of pro-Russian hackers announced in a Telegram post that it was targeting the Australian Home Affairs department with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The post cited Australia’s decision ‘to keep up with the global Russophobic trend’ and deliver the ‘Slinger “drone killer system” to Kyiv’ as the motive for the attack (1).
While a government spokesperson confirmed that the Home Affairs website was taken down for about five hours between 10pm and 3am AEDT, the hackers did not access any data. Notwithstanding the comparatively limited extent of the inflicted damage, the incident reveals the true nature of low-intensity cyberattacks. Such attacks take place in a context where perception, posturing and projections are key. By using cyber vectors and targeting information systems, ‘hearts and minds’ can be directly influenced. In this Brief, we focus on a set of operations that sit at the intersection of two distinct spheres - the cyber and human domains.
Cyber influence operations (CIOs) are a subset of influence operations that combine the use of force on cyber infrastructure with a broader strategy of interference in the human domain, that is, the dimension of conflict and warfare that centres on competing actors’ efforts to influence human perception in their pursuit of strategic objectives. Accordingly, CIOs draw on cyber vectors to shape the attitudes and actions of adversaries and non-aligned parties. In case of open conflict, this may have important implications on the balance of power in a warzone. For example, in 2023 Russia reportedly launched between 10 and 15 cyberattacks per day, amounting to a total of over 3000 attacks – often in support of conventional military activity (2).
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