Cyber Project

Join the Cyber Project with Bruce Schneier as he discusses his paper, The Coming AI Hackers:  Bruce Schneier warns that artificial intelligence will eventually find vulnerabilities in all sorts of social, economic, and political systems, and then exploit them at unprecedented speed, scale, and scope. After hacking humanity, AI systems will then hack other AI systems, and humans will be little more than collateral damage.

This event will be held at One Brattle, Suite 470 and will be capped at 15 students per COVID guidelines.

Join Russia Matters and the Cyber Project as we explore whether there should be “Rules of the Road” with Russia in the Cyber domain. Two of the authors of the recent paper, “US-Russian Contention in Cyberspace: Are Rules of the Road Necessary or Possible?” Cyber Project Executive Director Lauren Zabierek and Pavel Sharikov, senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, will provide their own perspectives on this topic, exploring where the US and Russia converge and diverge on the issues.

Moderated by Intelligence Project Director Paul Kolbe, this conversation will be especially relevant after the historic Biden-Putin Summit on June 16.  

Disclaimer: This event is under Chatham House Rules. The event organizers prohibit any attendees, including journalists, from audio/visual recording or distributing parts or all of the event program without prior written authorization. If any journalists in attendance would like to quote the panelists, please contact them directly.

Please join the Cyber Project and the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship in conversation with members of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) as they present their recommendations from the commission's final report. 

The final report focuses on two parts: Defending America in the AI Era, and Winning the Technology Competition.  You can read an interactive version of the report here: https://reports.nscai.gov/final-report/table-of-contents/ 

Disclaimer: While this virtual event is on the record, the event organizers prohibit any attendees, including journalists, from audio/visual recording or distributing parts or all of the event program without prior written authorization.

Join the Cyber Project in conversation with Nicole Perlroth, author of This is How They Tell Me the World Ends, which is the culmination of years of research and interviews covering the cyber arms race.  On this stop on her virtual book tour, we'll discuss where around the globe her research took  her, the conclusions she developed, and her thoughts for U.S. national cybersecurity policy. 

Disclaimer: While this virtual event is on the record, the event organizers prohibit any attendees, including journalists, from audio/visual recording or distributing parts or all of the event program without prior written authorization.

On Friday, March 19, the Cybersecurity and Data Privacy communities will come together to lift the voices of Black Women in the field as part of the #ShareTheMicInCyber campaign in celebration of Women’s History Month.  

#ShareTheMicInCyber is an online conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn started by Camille Stewart and Lauren Zabierek, with the aim of addressing a number of issues stemming from systemic racism in cybersecurity. The campaign highlights the experiences of Black practitioners in this field, catalyzing a critical conversation on race in the industry and shining a light on Black practitioners’ accomplishments to identify them as experts in their fields, all while creating professional opportunities and bringing the community together.

Racism, like cybersecurity, is a national security issue. It’s not enough to be “not racist”- we must be anti-racist. As a community, let’s stand up against systemic racism. Together, let’s honor our Black colleagues & lift up underrepresented voices. We are excited to celebrate Black Women in Security & Privacy on March 19, 2021--all day on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Salads. Movies. Our favorite cities. What do these things have to do with national security?   In this session, cybersecurity leaders Yolonda Smith, Ashley Tolbert, and Quiessence Phillips will discuss how they secure the things that we love, their thoughts on cyber defense and our nation's resilience amid ambient cyber conflict, and how to bridge the gap between trust and safety of products and services we use and our national security. 

Disclaimer: While this virtual event is on the record, the event organizers prohibit any attendees, including journalists, from audio/visual recording or distributing parts or all of the event program without prior written authorization.

Using two recent cyber operations that targeted civilians, WannaCry and NotPetya, Tarah Wheeler and Lord John Alderdice will discuss their research which proposes these operations were violations of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, specifically Article 7: Crimes Against Humanity and Article 8: War Crimes. They will show the actual code from these cyber weapons, discuss the impacts on civilians, propose obeying international law, and tell you why there will never be a cyber Pearl Harbor.

Please note: While this virtual event is on the record, the event organizers prohibit any attendees, including journalists, from audio/visual recording or distributing parts or all of the event program without prior written authorization.

Only a handful of countries are well known for their cyber impacts: notable, US, Israel, Iran, China, Russia and North Korea. But cyber visibility can give a misleading picture of actual cyber power. The full range of capabilities, objectives, and actors are often left out of the story. The Belfer Center’s Julia Voo, Anina Schwarzenbach, Irfan Hemani, Simon Jones, Winnona DeSombre and Daniel Cassidy have proposed a novel and more complete way to measure a country’s cyber power.

Belfer’s 2020 National Cyber Power Index looks at the cyber capabilities of 30 countries across seven national objectives such as surveillance, defense, intelligence gathering and destruction. It then measures a country’s capability within each objective. The team hope that through developing the NCPI the discussion of cyber power is broadened to reflect applications beyond destructive capabilities.

Join the Cyber Project on Tuesday February 9th as Julia and Anina walk us through their methodology and findings published in their groundbreaking National Cyber Power Index, which you can read here: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/national-cyber-power-index-2020

The Belfer Center's Intelligence and Cyber Projects will co-host a discussion on the recent Solarwinds Orion hack with David Sanger, Camille Stewart, Priscilla Moriuchi, and Dr. Erica Borghard on Wednesday, February 3rd from 12:00-1:15pm.

This event will be open to the public. Advance registration is required. 

The Cyber Project welcomes Dr. Sasha O'Connell, Tatyana Bolton, and Kiran Raj in conversation with Lauren Zabierek to analyze the National Cyber Director role.  Tatyana was a senior policy director for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Sasha and Kiran recently published their report, The United States Needs a Cyber Director: A Roadmap for Making It Happen in 2021.   

You can read their report here: https://www.american.edu/spa/upload/ncd-guide-final-oct-2020.pdf

You can access the Cyber Solarium Commission report here: https://www.solarium.gov/report