Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace by Erica D. Lonergan;Shawn W. Lonergan;

Author:Erica D. Lonergan;Shawn W. Lonergan;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The United States and North Korea

One might argue that the United States avoided escalating in response to Russian and Chinese behavior in cyberspace because it feared potential retaliation by those states, given their significant capabilities. By extension, one might expect that United States would be more willing to escalate in contests where it has a clearer advantage; in other words, against rivals over which it has a preponderant military advantage. The United States’ interactions with North Korea and Iran meet these characteristics. Indeed, the available, public evidence does suggest that the United States appeared to be more willing to employ cyber capabilities in response to or as part of its strategic interactions with those states. That said, none of the activity could reasonably be characterized as escalatory.

In this section, we evaluate what is arguably the most well-known interaction between the United States and North Korea in cyberspace: the 2014 Sony Hack, carried out by a threat actor known as the Lazarus Group, with links to North Korea.128 In Chapter 6, we will explore the role of cyber operations in the context of the 2017 crisis between the two states, where there was a real and meaningful risk that the situation would escalate to war. The 2014 Sony Hack was part of a failed coercive attempt by Pyongyang to prevent the release of a film, The Interview, that it perceived as portraying the regime in a negative light. The U.S. response to the Sony Hack provides further support for the contention that cyber operations are not likely to cause escalation. However, we acknowledge that this case does not represent a hard test of our theory.

North Korea’s cyber operation against Sony Pictures is an example where the risks of escalation are not as salient as in other cases. North Korean threat actors targeted a private company in the entertainment sector, not an essential part of critical infrastructure. And while the Sony hack was the “most elaborate cyberattack from [North Korea] on US soil,” it served different strategic purposes than other cyber attacks because it was aimed at preventing a private company from releasing what Pyongyang perceived to be an embarrassing film, rather than achieving a geopolitical objective.129 Even so, there were some concerns that the threat actors would follow through with threats to carry out a terrorist attack if their demands were not met. Regardless, it is notable that the U.S. response was similar to that in other cases: limited to diplomatic, legal, and economic instruments. Moreover, the situation did not escalate and is consistent with the type of tit-for-tat dynamics that have played out across the other cases.

The Interview depicted two U.S. journalists conscripted by the Central Intelligence Agency to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. On November 21, several top Sony executives received a cryptic email from a group calling themselves God’sApstls demanding monetary compensation or else “Sony would be bombarded as a whole.”130 Additionally, Sony’s Twitter feed was taken over and displayed a message stating that the two co-chairs of Sony were “going to hell.

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