How Can We Know What We Think We Know about Cyber Operations?

Abstract

Academic research on cyber operations is characterized by an exceptional paucity of work on sources and methods of information gathering and analysis. This lack of attention can arguably hinder the future development of this increasingly important area of research and weaken its potential impact on policymaking and the wider society. This article sets to redress this undesirable situation by addressing a number of critical questions: What obstacles make collecting information on cyber operations especially hard? What are the main sources of information available to the scholar of cyber international relations? Why should we rely critically on these sources? This article's second main contribution is to advance the adoption of a research technique for the study of cyber operations based on a combination of Triangulation and Problematization called TP technique. The article also provides three detailed examples of how this research technique can be used in practice to investigate specific scenarios concerning real-world cyber operations. The article ends with a discussion of the limitations of the proposed technique while also reaffirming the benefits deriving from its application to the study of cyber operations.