Suchergebnisse

On one June afternoon in 2017, during an autoethnography of a malware analysis and detection laboratory, NotPetya quickly caused destruction. This malware has since been characterised as a key geopolitical event in cybersecurity, causing billions of dollars in damage as it rendered inoperable computers across the world. The hunt to identify those who had written NotPetya occurred almost immediately. However, this paper rearticulates this event through grammar, in a close reading of computation, to urge for a more-than-human reading of cybersecurity. By exploring the written propositions of the hackers, various computational materials – including hardware, code, and machine learning algorithms – as well as their ecologies, cybersecurity is understood to be part of an ecology of language-practice. Engaging with N. Katherine Hayles' study of non-human cognition and choice, computation has an ability to read, interpret, and act, and thus intervene. NotPetya is thus not only a tool of hackers but is a political actor which, alongside others, transformed the contours of the geopolitics of cybersecurity. By focusing on grammars, geopolitics does not wholly derive from the (white, male, rational) hacker, analyst, or intelligence agent, but rather from a distributed set of actors that speak to one another. Grammars permit a nuanced appreciation of cyber-attacks, the hacker's handling of computational cognition and choice, as well as conceptualising the relation between author and computation and the risks of machine learning. Cybersecurity, through grammar, then becomes one of co-authorship where security is not only performed by humans but is contorted by an alien politics of computation.

Cybersecurity has attracted significant political, social, and technological attention as contemporary societies have become increasingly reliant on computation. Today, at least within the Global North, there is an ever-pressing and omnipresent threat of the next "cyber-attack" or the emergence of a new vulnerability in highly interconnected supply chains. However, such discursive positioning of threat and its resolution has typically reinforced, and perpetuated, dominant power structures and forms of violence as well as universalist protocols of protection. In this collective discussion, in contrast, six scholars from different disciplines discuss what it means to "do" "critical" research into what many of us uncomfortably refer to as "cybersecurity." In a series of provocations and reflections, we argue that, as much as cybersecurity may be a dominant discursive mode with associated funding and institutional "benefits," it is crucial to look outward, in conversation with other moves to consider our technological moment. That is, we question who and what cybersecurity is for, how to engage as academics, and what it could mean to undo cybersecurity in ways that can reassess and challenge power structures in the twenty-first century.