The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies presents:

Expert Panel: SolarWinds: Shifting the Standards of Cyberespionage

Peter Clement, Senior Research Scholar, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University

Jason Healey, Senior Research Scholar, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

JD Work, Bren Chair for Cyber Conflict and Security, Marine Corps University; Research Scholar, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University

moderated by Kimberly Marten, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, Barnard College 

 

Advance registration required. Registrants will be sent a Zoom link prior to the event. 

 

Abstract

The widespread compromise of nine US government agencies and numerous commercial firms through the vulnerabilities in SolarWinds have been reported as an act of “cyber terrorism”, or an “act of war” conducted through cyberspace. In this panel, experts will discuss the landscape of cyber conflict, the nuances of cyberespionage, and what large-scale cyber incidents like SolarWinds means for the future of cyberspace.

Bios

Peter Clement is Senior Research Scholar/Adjunct Professor at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He served as Deputy Assistant Director of CIA for Europe and Eurasia since 2015. From 2005-2013, he was Deputy Director for Intelligence for Analytic Programs. Clement served as the PDB daily briefer for Vice-President Cheney, NSC Adviser Rice and Deputy NSC Adviser Hadley in 2003-2004. He briefly served at the National Security Council as the Director for Russia and later served as the senior CIA representative to the US Mission to the United Nations. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 2001, Clement has published journal articles and book chapters on Soviet and Russian foreign policy, Central Asia, and the Cuban missile crisis.

Jason Healey is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs specializing in cyber conflict and cyber risk. He also serves as a part-time senior cybersecurity strategist with the National Risk Management Center of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Prior to joining SIPA, he was the founding director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council. Healey was the editor of the first history of conflict in cyberspace, A Fierce Domain: Cyber Conflict, 1986 to 2012 and co-authored the book Cyber Security Policy Guidebook by Wiley. He is on the review board of the Black Hat and DEF CON security and hacker conferences and served on the Defense Science Board task force on cyber deterrence. Healey’s ideas on cyber topics have been widely published in over a hundred articles and essays published by the World Economic Forum, Aspen Strategy Group, Atlantic Council, and National Research Council.

JD Work serves as the Bren Chair for Cyber Conflict and Security at the Marine Corps University, where he leads research to develop the theory, practice, and operational art of the cyber warfighting function, and to explore the wider role of the cyber instrument in national security strategy, and the future defense competition and stability problem space. Work has over two decades experience working in cyber intelligence and operations roles for the private sector and US government. He previously directed multiple international research programs to provide insight into the emerging strategic issues, economic consequences, and technology implications created by hostilities in the virtual domain. This work has sought to establish a reliable baseline of observations regarding the engagements, follow on effects, capabilities, doctrine, and drivers behind the antagonistic action of potential combatants in the networked environment, in order to support early warning, crisis management and crisis prevention in and through cyberspace.

Kimberly Marten is a professor of political science (and the department chair) at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is a faculty member of Columbia’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies. She has written four books, including Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States (Cornell, 2012) and Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton, 1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize. The Council on Foreign Relations published her special report, Reducing Tensions between Russia and NATO (2017). In addition to her numerous academic journal articles, her policy pieces have appeared in the Washington Quarterly, ForeignAffairs.com, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, and the New Republic, and she was honored to testify before Congress about Russia’s Wagner Group in July 2020. She earned her A.B. at Harvard and Ph.D. at Stanford. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and is a founding member of PONARS-Eurasia.