A Tale of Two Cybers - How Threat Reporting by Cybersecurity Firms Systematically Underrepresents Threats to Civil Society

Public and academic knowledge of cyber conflict relies heavily on data from commercial threat reporting. According to Lennart Maschmeyer, there are reasons to be concerned that these data provide a distorted view of cyber threat activity. This article analyzes an original dataset of available public reporting by the private sector together with independent research centers. It also presents three case studies tracing reporting patterns on a cyber operation targeting civil society. The findings confirm the neglect of civil society threats, supporting the hypothesis that commercial interests of firms will produce a systematic bias in reporting, which functions as much as advertising as intelligence. The result is a truncated sample of cyber conflict that underrepresents civil society targeting and distorts academic debate as well as public policy.