Cyberwarfare between nation states has become increasingly common in recent years. To address several important questions that this phenomenon raises, scientists developed a game theoretical model of cyberwarfare between nations.

Their research, which is published in Economic Inquiry, focuses on factors that determine the severity and outcomes of cyber conflicts. With a two-country model—where nations invest in offensive or defensive cyber capabilities across networked systems—the investigators considered different scenarios where the Attacker is the “high value” player and the Defender is the “low value” player, and vice versa.

The work showed that when the Attacker is able to attack a network through many channels, this implies a relatively lower Attacker cost versus Defender cost and will hurt the Defender. Network structures that minimize the number of attack vectors available to an Attacker tend to be beneficial for the Defender because they allow defensive resources to be used more efficiently. Also, cyber conflict is most intense when countries’ cyber capabilities become more alike, which helps to explain why smaller and less technologically advanced countries are increasingly engaged in cyberwarfare with major powers like the United States.

The investigators also assessed the impact of public versus private cyber defenders, and they considered when centralized policies may either improve or exacerbate cyber conflicts.

“When nations’ technological capabilities converge, conflicts become more intense—which helps explain why smaller countries can now wage effective cyberwarfare against superpowers,” said corresponding author Rishi Sharma, PhD, of Colgate University. “Perhaps most surprisingly, we found that centralized government control of cybersecurity doesn’t always help; sometimes it can actually provoke more aggressive attacks, suggesting that blanket regulations may do more harm than good.”