Science, Technology, and Public Policy

"Belfer Center Newsmakers" highlights members of the Belfer Center community who have been featured recently in the news.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Cyber Readiness at a Glance is the ninth study in a series of country reports assessing national-level preparedness for cyber risks based on the Cyber Readiness Index (CRI) 2.0 methodology. This report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of Saudi Arabia’ current cyber security posture and its efforts to strengthen the country's security and resilience in the wake of significant cyber threats to the nation.

As President Trump increasingly boxes in Tehran, U.S. allies should be worried about the potential for a devastating cyberattack from the Islamic Republic.

A Senior Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) official described a war in cyberspace as "more dangerous than a physical war." This statement was likely made in 2012, in response to a wave of publicly reported cyber operations against Iran, including Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame. Since these operations, Iran has expanded the role of cyber capabilities in its broader national security strategy. Cyber Security Project Director Michael Sulmeyer assesses the role of cyber tools in Iran's broader strategy.

In March, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against seven Iranians for hacking the U.S. financial sector and a dam in New York. In doing so, it also clarified what information security officials have argued for years: that the vast majority of hacks exploit known vulnerabilities.

The Project on Managing the Atom offers fellowships for pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and mid-career researchers for one year, with a possibility for renewal, in the stimulating environment of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. The online application for 2016-2017 fellowships opened December 15, 2015, and the application deadline is January 15, 2016. Recommendation letters are due by February 1, 2016.

"The key to a solution to both — the quagmire that has unfolded in Syria and the threat posed by Islamic terrorism — is to deprive the terrorist groups of their main propaganda tools and to form a new Syrian government that excludes Assad (and his foreign Shiite allies) but includes representatives from all of the non-fundamentalist groups involved in the civil war."

Join Dan Meridor, former Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset, former Chairman of the committee which wrote the report on the Israel Defense Doctrine, and former Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, for a three-session study group on Israel's Defense in the Changing Middle East in November.

"In little more than a generation, the Internet has become the substrate of the global economy and governance worldwide. Several billion more human users will be added in the next decade, as will tens of billions of devices, ranging from thermostats to industrial control systems (the 'Internet of Things'). All of this burgeoning interdependence implies vulnerabilities that governments and non-governmental actors can exploit. At the same time, we are only beginning to come to terms with the national-security implications of this. Strategic studies of the cyber domain resemble nuclear strategy in the 1950s: analysts are still not clear about the meaning of offense, defense, deterrence, escalation, norms, and arms control."

The ninth Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will be held at the UN Headquarters in New York from April 27-May 22, 2015. This is the fourth such conference since the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995. Participating governments will discuss nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy with a view to arriving at consensus on a number of issues.