CyberPeace Digest - January 2024

Dear Readers,?

Happy New Year!

We hope the first month of the year presented itself to you with a fresh start, launching new ideas.

2024 began with several publications from the CyberPeace Institute and we are proud to kick off the new year with plenty of projects and ideas. We were also very proud to start 2024 by surpassing the 200 NGOs mark in the CyberPeace Builders!?

In this month’s edition of our newsletter, we will present to you a new report which we have published together with The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies on Cyber Transparency. We also offer you a closer look on our perspective - not only as cyberpeace advocates - but also targets. The new year might be young, yet there have already been some developments regarding the UN Cybercrime Convention. Learn more about them and our revisited version of the Multistakeholder Manifesto.?

Lastly, join us for a retrospective look on the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building (GC3B), which we co-organized in November 2023.

Thank you for joining us for this month's newsletter on LinkedIn!

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Protecting over 200 NGOs

Right before the end of 2023, we were able to celebrate our growing community by reaching the 200 NGOs mark in the CyberPeace Builders project.

We are very proud to reach this milestone of 200 NGOs under our protective umbrella.?The CyberPeace Builders count more than 600 cybersecurity volunteers from over 120 countries, who spent over a 1000 hours on cyber peace building. These achievements make us very proud, but also make us want to strive further!

We want to say a big thank you and congratulations to our NGO network!

Cyber Transparency Value Chain

The (im-)plausible deniability and lack of transparency on attribution of cyberattacks limits diplomatic efforts as discussions lack a sound basis for common exchange.

Together with?The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies?(HCSS), we are working towards increasing cyber transparency, to inform policy processes and capacity building efforts, and contribute to accountability efforts.

We have jointly published the Report Cyber Transparency Value Chain: From Awareness and Understanding to Attribution, Monitoring and Sanctioning, Open Source Monitors and Observatories. This report provides an overview of the monitors and observatories developed to date by each organization, which evolve as the threat and policy landscape evolves.

From cyber peace advocates to targets: The CyberPeace Institute too faces cyber threats

At the CyberPeace Institute, our mission revolves around safeguarding the most vulnerable in cyberspace.?Yet, have you ever considered the impact of cyber threats on organisations like ours?

Through analysis and in our daily work, we are witnessing a rise in attacks on NGOs, a trend that directly involves us, too. As a collective, we have all encountered the disruptive force of cyber attacks.?

This blog post serves as a candid exploration of our experiences over the past three years and how we confronted different types of incidents, from spear phishing to DDoS attacks in the hope of learning from them together.

Read the story here.

Revisiting the Multistakholder Manifesto at the 11th Hour

In September 2021, the CyberPeace Institute and the Cybersecurity Tech Accord brought together the multistakeholder cybersecurity community to sign a Multistakeholder Manifesto. This document outlined human-centric principles essential for developing an effective and rights-respecting criminal justice instrument and was endorsed by over 50 civil society and industry representatives.

However, the revised negotiating text does not reflect the principles advocated by the multistakeholder community or the input provided by the accredited organisations over the course of the two-year negotiation. This is why the CyberPeace Institute and the Cybersecurity Tech Accord are once again coming together to assess how the principles have been reflected in the UN deliberations in this revised version of our Multistakeholder Manifesto.

If you want to dive deeper into the UN Cybercrime Convention and negotiations, we have published several blog posts in the past month, which you can find here.

A Nexus of Innovation and Collaboration for Cyber Resilience in Development

The rapid expansion of cyberspace in today’s world has made digital resilience essential for sustainable development, yet still disregarded, particularly in certain critical sectors where cybersecurity infrastructure is given secondary consideration. Bringing this into attention, together with Global Forum on Cyber Expertise (GFCE), the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, the Institute organized the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building (GC3B) hosted by the Government of Ghana in Accra.

Under the theme of? “Cyber Resilience for Development", GC3B has been a first-of-its-kind gathering of leaders, decision-makers, and experts. Out of an intense and deeply insightful two-day conference, we would like to share a few highlights.

Read the blog post here.