HACKERS INTO THE UN? Engaging in the cyber discussions on war & peace - DEF CON Policy Panel

The panel discusses how the cybersecurity community can contribute to international discussions on war and peace in cyberspace, particularly in the United Nations. They aim to encourage the process of breaking down the walls between traditional diplomacy and cybersecurity, and to speed up the process of establishing norms on cyber behavior.

• The panelists are experts in cybersecurity and have recently engaged in international discussions on war and peace in cyberspace, particularly in the United Nations.
• The cybersecurity community needs to contribute to these discussions to establish norms on cyber behavior.
• The walls between traditional diplomacy and cybersecurity are slowly coming down, but the process needs to be sped up.
• The panel hopes to encourage the process of breaking down these walls and to speed up the establishment of norms on cyber behavior.
• The process of establishing norms on cyber behavior is slow and requires more engagement from the cybersecurity community.

The speaker shares an anecdote about a diplomat from a particular country who shared with him an idea to have every cybersecurity incident in the country reported to one national entity. The diplomat cited a document from the UN that stated states needed to take ownership to not allow their territory to be used for internationally wrongful acts using technology. The speaker emphasizes the importance of providing technical insights and perspectives in these discussions to avoid being prescribed or bucketed in a particular category that would make it difficult for incident responders to do their work.

As if 2020 and 2021 were not bad enough, the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to have been accompanied by a new rash of bad cyber- attacks on major platforms like Solarwinds and Microsoft, infrastructures worldwide subverted in ransomware campaigns, and even the very organizations researching and fighting the pandemic have been hit. Meanwhile, the hard work of cyber diplomacy continues, with talks on war and peace in the United Nations reaching a new stage as two working groups presented their final report and a third one is in the process of being born. Mostly the topics are on establishing norms on cyber behavior, rules of the road of what states can do in cyberspace.  But where are the hackers in all this? The Internet is famously not run by intergovernmental organizations, so the companies, civil society groups and others should somehow be involved – and one of the UN processes did in fact make a small step in that direction. But the staid ways of pin-striped cyber are hard to change. What is the best way for the community to engage?