DR. KERSTIN ZETTL-SCHABATH
News
Happy to share that I will give a keynote next week (May 1, 2024) at Denmark's no. 1 Cybersecurity Expo V2 in Copenhagen! I will talk about Espionage, sabotage, disruption and ransomware and how we at EuRepoC dissect cyber incidents to shed light on cyber threats.
I very much enjoyed being part of the fascinating documentary "Putins Bären - Die gefährlichsten Hacker der Welt" (Putin`s bears - the most dangerous hackers in the world) as an expert on Russian cyber operations in the context of the US elections in 2016:
I also had the opportunity to talk to Trend Micro's Robert Wortmann in his great podcast Breach FM about cyber proxies, differences between democratic and autocratic cyber-strategies and why I do not like the term "cyber-war"... and many more topics!
ABOUT
Hello! My name is Kerstin Zettl-Schabath, I am a researcher at Heidelberg University, currently working in the project "European Repository of Cyber Incidents" (EuRepoC), which is composed of four different institutions: Heidelberg University (Institute for Political Science), German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), University of Innsbruck Institute for Theory and Future of Law and the Cyber Policy Institute (CPI, Estonia).
For EuRepoC, I investigate and code a broad spectrum of cyber incidents with regard to their political characteristics and publish research analyses in that context. This follows on from my work in the predecessor project "Security through Obfuscation: Why Governments Use Proxies in Cyber Conflicts" at Heidelberg University, which was funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research. Therein, I built a cyber conflict dataset comprising more than 1,200 cyber incidents (HD-CY.CON). As part of my German-speaking dissertation that analyzed autocratic (Russia and China) as well as democratic (USA and Israel) cyber proxy strategies, I used the dataset as an empirical basis. Not only is this work the first to examine the role of private threat intelligence firms in democratic attribution processes, but it also contrasts this defensive cyber proxy strategy with a comprehensive analysis of offensive cyber proxy use patterns by autocratic states.
By analyzing cyber operations I also investigate different types of cyber attackers, such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), but also hacktivists and cyber criminals. In the volume I co-edited, "Asymmetries in Cyber Conflicts. How Attribution and the Use of Proxies Influence the Development of Norms", I compared Iranian and North Korean cyber proxies with regard to their functions as well as institutional ties to the respective regimes. My other research is also published in Journal of Cyber Policy, Democracy & Security and forthcoming in Routledge (contribution to a handbook of proxy wars, expected for spring 2023).
In addition to my work on the EuRepoC project, I also give presentations on topics related to cyber conflict at public events, workshops, and conferences.
