Applying Resilience to Hybrid Threats

Where hybrid threats represent potential disruptions to interlaced and interdependent systems within national and local governments, companies, and even individual households, methodologies are needed to help identify and understand 1) the source of the disruptions; 2) the system vulnerabilities they exploit with varying degrees of success; and 3) the potential for cascading harms to infrastructure, information systems, and social harmony and cohesion should a hybrid threat be successful. The need for such methodologies is particularly salient given the rise of cyberhacking, data theft, and fake news events triggered by state and nonstate actors. To address these challenges, a multifactorial, multitemporal approach is needed that allows for a whole -of -system view of how disruptions can percolate throughout the nested interconnections of hybrid -threat targets.

Digital interconnectedness has revolutionized how we acquire information and make decisions. Information—whether news being distributed on the Internet or a status update on social media—can now percolate almost instantaneously through a network. Although such digital interconnectedness has generated tens of billions of dollars of business revenue each year and vastly improved social connectivity, it also raises the potential for deliberate misuses of digital systems to wreak havoc on at-risk or unsuspecting users. As systems to spread and store information among diverse networks have become more efficient, they have also become more vulnerable. Misuse of these systems generates increased levels of harm to larger populations and user groups than in decades past.