How does big tech affect national security? CSET experts Ben Buchanan, Katerina Sedova, and Lorand Laskai give their input in this Foreign Affairs survey.

Six Chinese universities have relationships with Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) hacking teams. Their activities range from recruitment to running cyber operations. These partnerships, themselves a case study in military-civil fusion, allow state-sponsored hackers to quickly move research from the lab to the field. This report examines these universities’ relationships with known APTs and analyzes the schools’ AI/ML research that may translate to future operational capabilities.

Cyber AI Director Ben Buchanan sat down with Scientific American to discuss the cyberattack on an Oldsmar, Florida water supply facility and how to protect public facilities in the future.

CSET's CyberAI Director Ben Buchanan discusses whether the Russian cyber hack was targeted to affect the U.S. court system.

Open source intelligence (OSINT) and science and technology intelligence (STI) are realized differently in the United States and China, China putting greater value on both. In the United States’ understanding, OSINT “enables” classified reporting, while in China it is the intelligence of first resort. This contrast extends to STI which has a lower priority in the U.S. system, whereas China and its top leaders personally lavish great attention on STI and rely on it for national decisions. Establishing a “National S&T Analysis Center” within the U.S. government could help to address these challenges.

U.S. research security requires trust and collaboration between those conducting R&D and the federal government. Most R&D takes place in the private sector, outside of government authority and control, and researchers are wary of federal government or law enforcement involvement in their work. Despite these challenges, as adversaries work to extract science, technology, data and know-how from the United States, the U.S. government is pursuing an ambitious research security initiative. In order to secure the 78 percent of U.S. R&D funded outside the government, authors Melissa Flagg and Zachary Arnold propose a new, public-private research security clearinghouse, with leadership from academia, business, philanthropy, and government and a presence in the most active R&D hubs across the United States.

As states turn to AI to gain an edge in cyber competition, it will change the cat-and-mouse game between cyber attackers and defenders. Embracing machine learning systems for cyber defense could drive more aggressive and destabilizing engagements between states. Wyatt Hoffman writes that cyber competition already has the ingredients needed for escalation to real-world violence, even if these ingredients have yet to come together in the right conditions.

CSET senior fellow Anna Puglisi comments on a busted theft of U.S. semiconductor secrets. "Technological knowledge is as important as the actual widgets."

In the syndicated public radio program "Here & Now," CSET's Director of CyberAI, Ben Buchanan, explains what happened in the SolarWinds cyber attack.

Director of CSET's Cybersecurity and AI project Ben Buchanan questions the intent of the 2020 cyberespionage campaign.