Russia's Cyber Outsourcing: Risk vs. Benefit #shorts

Russia they don't care. Um now let's see uh the risk benefit for for Russia um on the risk side obviously you have a huge lack of control but if you outsource to uh informal actors like um independent hackers im groups or even activist group uh you don't have full control of them over them. they have their own uh motivation and they some most of the time only partially align uh with the state's motivation and their motivation or the engagements can also change in times. So when you engage with this type of actor um it's unpredictable and they are not really reliable. Uh they could also have risky behavior that don't align fully with um uh the

uh state interests or uh escalating tension with adversaries. For instance, in the benefit side, you have reduced costs because you don't have to maintain um pool of highly trained uh IT specialists and um and you have flexibility and innovation because uh intelligence agency there are bureaucratic institutions and we know that [laughter] this type of institution are not the best to be super innovative. creative super flexible. So this is something they can mobilize from uh uh thread actors that are out there uh on the underground and that are way more agile uh than than uh state actors. But Russia, they don't care. They deny even if it's their own uh operative that conduct operations. uh even if it's

super they you have a lot of evidence pointing to them pointing to even yeah operative uh from the FSB they will say it's not them so uh actually I think the concept of implausible denability works better here which is uh the performative uh discourse of denying responsibility for any uh engagement and this is what uh Russia does And actually this um strategy is quite good because it maintain ambiguity and it leave the adversary in a position where they don't know how to respond or if they should respond. This has are the risk benefit calculus that uh the Russian state does when uh outsourcing its cyber capabilities.