Cyber Conflicts and Small States

The probability of a world-wide cyber conflict is small. Yet the probability of forms of cyber conflict, regional or even global, could be argued as being very high. Small countries are usually signatories to military and economic alliances with major world powers but rely heavily on the technical ability of these powers in protecting their own national interests. They may be considered to be IT ’technology colonies’. Their cyber infrastructure is usually fully imported and their ability to assess it is limited. This book poses the question: to what extent should, or can, a small country prepare itself for handling the broad range of cyber threats? Looking at cyber-warfare, cyber-terrorism, cyber-crime and associated concerns, national experts from New Zealand, Australia, The Netherlands, and Poland present analyses of cyber-defence realities, priorities and options for smaller countries. They show that what is needed is the ability of small nations to be able to define and prepare appropriate responses such as the role of military/law enforcement/business entities, continuity and resilience strategies, incident response and business continuity plans and more for handing nationally-aimed cyber-attacks particularly where these address national critical infrastructures.

Lech J. Janczewski is Associate Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He wrote above 300 publications presented in scientific journals, conference proceedings and books. He is the chairperson of the New Zealand Information Security Forum, secretary of the IFIP committee on Security and Privacy Protection in Information Processing Systems and the Fellow of the Institute of IT Professionals (former New Zealand Computer Society). Professor William Caelli is Professor Emeritus at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He is Director of International Information Security Consultants Pty Ltd (IISEC) and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University on the Gold Coast in Queensland. He has 40 years' experience in all aspects of information/cyber security and over 50 years' experience in ICT overall.