Cordyceps Analysis Report on PRANA Network Hack and Leak Operation:

Lately I've been reading a lot of academic papers, mostly the Research Handbook on Cyberwarfare. Some of them are good papers! JD Work has a paper in it! But also some of them get wrapped around the idea of "Cyber War vs Cyberwarfare" (!??!) or fall in love with "hacktivists" or stomp furiously around all the real issues in the domain without ever stepping on the green. 

The thing about Persistent Engagement and Integrated Deterrence and Defend Forward is that yes, as Paul Wither's points out in "Do we need an effects-based approach for cyber operations?" or as the Grugq points out in his latest keynotes, we do need to look at "effects" in a broad way when talking about cyber operations. But the goal of your offensive counter-cyber operations is not to "reduce the number of incoming operations", as Jay Healey would try to measure, but to mitigate strategic effects! 

In other words, if the Chinese are hacking as much as possible in the LLM space, but somehow don't manage to launch their own market-leading LLM because for some reason their experiments on Huawei Ascend chips all mysteriously have weirdly wide bands of error, that is Defend Forward working! Did nobody in all of cyber policy academia read the Three Body Problem?

Academics should love this part of the theory, really, because arguing about strategic effects is 90% of what they do, usually without ever opening up a Neo4j Database filled with stolen mail spools to see what's really happening on the wire.

Anyways, if you like the kind of reporting in our PRANA report, we offer paid reporting as well. :)

Thanks,

Dave Aitel