Tag Archive for: Cyberwarfare

The Undeclared War’s creator on showing cyberwarfare on TV

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Writer/director Peter Kosminsky is no stranger to British television. From his start in the late 1980s working on documentaries to writing and directing recent projects such as Wolf Hall and The State, Kosminsky has covered topics as diverse as the Falklands War, British ISIS agents in Syria, and Thomas Cromwell’s clash with King Henry VIII in the 16th century.

His latest project, the six-episode Peacock series The Undeclared War, tackles a new subject: cyberwarfare and Russian aggression during the 2024 British general election. While set in the near future, the show deals with topical themes that are both realistic and sobering. In an interview with Digital Trends, Kosminsky talks about casting such notable actors as Star Trek’s Simon Pegg and Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance and the urgency to fictionalize a very real threat to democracy around the world.

Digital Trends: What was the genesis behind the creation of The Undeclared War?

Peter Kosminsky: Well, like a lot of people, I watched some “bad actors” trying to undermine the U.S. presidential election in 2016. I found that really frightening. What do we have if we don’t have the integrity of our election system? I mean, look at what happened to the last U.S. presidential election, the sort of poisonous impact that’s having on political life in the United States. As far as I can tell from a distance, if people lose trust in their elections, it’s serious.

Absolutely.

So that’s where I started. You know, I thought, Ok, what’s going on here in England? And the more I dug into it, the more terrifying it became. Actually, I didn’t even know that there was a fourth domain of conflict called cyber. I knew about land, sea and air, and that was it, really. I discovered that there was a hot war going on in the cyber domain. They were firing cyber weapons at each other [Britain and Russia]. And it was, by its nature, escalatory. When I started to look at the Russian concept of information operations, they see cyber as just one aspect of it.

The cast of The Undeclared War populate on computer screens for the series poster.

I realized that there was a concrete strategy at play to try to create chaos in our society, in the West, to try to undermine people’s trust in our institutions, in our…

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First Trailer for Laura Poitras’s Doc ‘Terror Contagion’ on Cyberwarfare

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First Trailer for Laura Poitras’s Doc ‘Terror Contagion’ on Cyberwarfare

by Alex Billington
January 26, 2022
Source: YouTube

Terror Contagion Trailer

“What we’re seeing is this escalation.” We’re now in the era of cyberwarfare. Neon has revealed an official trailer for the documentary short Terror Contagion, a 25-min film made by Oscar-winning doc filmmaker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, Risk). The film premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last year, and is being considered for Best Documentary Short at the upcoming Oscars this year. Terror Contagion is a visual study of the investigation by Forensic Architecture into the Israeli cyberweapons manufacturer NSO Group and the use of its “Pegasus” malware to target journalists and human rights defenders worldwide. You may have heard about this software, as it has been found on the phones of many of the most high profile people in the world, and is being used by nefarious agencies to achieve their goals of dominance and control. Scary.

Here’s the official trailer (+ poster) for Laura Poitras’ doc Terror Contagion, direct from YouTube:

Terror Contagion Poster

In Terror Contagion, Academy Award- winner Laura Poitras teams with Forensic Architecture to expose the NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons firm. NO’s spyware has enabled corrupt governments around the world to terrorize activists and journalists, including the unconscionable murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Together, Poitras and Forensic Architecture craft a powerful, urgent look at the rising threat of the surveillance state and its implications worldwide. Terror Contagion is directed by award-winning American producer / journalist / filmmaker Laura Poitras, director of the doc films Flag Wars, My Country My Country, The Oath, Citizenfour, and Risk previously. It’s produced by Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras, and Anonymous. This first premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last year. Neon will debut Terror Contagion streaming on VOD starting this week. You can watch the film now on Neon’s website here.

Find more posts: Documentaries, Short Film, To Watch, Trailer

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A new era of cyberwarfare is upon us – but is the world ready for it?

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When American and Israeli operatives launched the Stuxnet cyber attack against Iran’s nuclear programme more than a decade ago, they patted themselves on the back. Without firing a single shot or sacrificing a single life, the spies, engineers and hackers told themselves they were able to severely damage Iran’s ability to produce enriched uranium, and slow down its nuclear programme.

That conclusion proved rather misguided, as Iran quickly used its know-how to continue ramping up its nuclear programme to even greater capacity. But even back then, there were worried grumbles in the still-nascent cybersecurity industry that the worm or something like it, which had been in development for years, could be reverse-engineered or emulated and used by its targets.

In fact, they were not gloomy enough. Stuxnet heralded a new era of global cyberwarfare, and increasingly, ordinary people are being caught in the crossfire.

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John Arquilla on the New Challenge of Cyberwarfare – The Diplomat

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As we move into the era of 5G networks and the Internet of Things, the challenges of keeping online systems safe and secure is growing ever-more daunting. In parallel, the question of cyberwar is looming larger and larger.

But this is not a new problem. John Arquilla, distinguished professor of defense analysis at the United States Naval Postgraduate School, originally coined the term “cyberwar” over 20 years ago and remains one of the world’s leading experts on the threats posed by cyber technologies to national security. His recent book, “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare” discusses the state of cyberattacks and cybersecurity – and he finds the U.S. critically underprepared for the age of cyberwarfare.

In this interview, Arquilla discusses the future of cyberwar, the potential for cyber arms control, and how best to respond to cyberattacks.

You’ve been discussing cyberwar for 30 years — you even coined the term. But obviously the technologies involved, for both offense and defense, have evolved dramatically since the early 1990s. How has the cyberthreat landscape changed in the past few years, as the Internet of Things and 5G connections become the new normal?

Certainly the scale, pace, and complexity of cyber operations have increased exponentially since the early 1990s. And greater connectivity, especially of physical infrastructures built before the Web and the Net but now connected to them, makes them particularly vulnerable to disruptive malware and other, ever more subtle and hard to detect cyber weapons.

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What hasn’t changed, however, is the fact that attackers still have a considerable edge over defenders, which foretells a period of more active, destabilizing cyberwarfare.

Cyberwarfare is sometimes thought of as an alternative to traditional warfare, but it could be a powerful force booster in a real-world conflict. As you outline, we’ve already seen glimpses of this, for example, in U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you describe some of the ways cyber operations could be used alongside kinetic operations in a future war?

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