Lennart Maschmeyer is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the nature of cyber power and the relationship between operational constraints and strategic dynamics in cyber conflict. Lennart is also working on a second project compiling a dataset of threat intelligence reporting to identify potential sources of bias in the data and how these impact prevailing threat perceptions. He is a Fellow at The Citizen Lab.
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Cyber Operations can be used in many strategic contexts, yet because they rely on secret exploitation they are invariably subject to the trilemma. Consequently, cyber operations tend to become less effective—and thus less attractive options—the more important and urgent the strategic goals are that an actor pursues.
Cyber operations are not novel, nor is their impact revolutionary. They are instruments of subversion that promise great gains in theory but are constrained in practice by a crippling operational trilemma that limits strategic value.
Successfully prevailing against adversaries requires not only persistence but also the shrewd employment of secrecy.