Cyberspace and Geopolitics: Assessing Global Cybersecurity Norm Processes at a Crossroads

As countries realize the economic threat of cyber attacks on their citizens and corporations, they are realizing that they all need to have some guidance on how to keep from falling behind and open to attacks. While the current cyber norm ecosystem is a good start, there are few key weaknesses of our current cyber norm strategy identified in this paper. First is the ease of access for any person to engage in a cyber attack that could be very costly for a large company or government organization. Additionally, there is difficulty in governments to understand each others cyber behavior. Finally, the incentive for governments to follow the norms is perceived to be very low and leads to lack of implementation. These weaknesses can be addressed in a variety of ways, such as creating tooling for governments to communicate their cyber processes, researching ways to incentivize various parties to implement cyber norms, or communicate to them the reasons it should be done, and bringing together representation from all of the people involved to discuss the norms and where the responsibilities lie.