Cyber Espionage in the Age of US–China Competition

Examines how the often-contradictory relationships between states, hackers and tech companies can undermine trust in cyber space, and complicate government spying operations.

Examines how the often-contradictory relationships between states, hackers and tech companies can undermine trust in cyber space, and complicate government spying operations.

Even the most elite hackers use common technologies to steal state secrets, which help intelligence agencies to catch them. Are these hackers simply reckless, or do their operations reveal something deeper about their nation-state patrons?

Over a globally interconnected Internet, nations must constantly toe the delicate line of maintaining stability--developing shared tech protocols that they themselves must also break, in order to spy. This is the paradox at the heart of cyber espionage: states need to cooperate if they are to compete. As the US and China vie for strategic advantage through a new form of statecraft in cyber space, an intensifying cat-and-mouse game makes cyber security more difficult, more expensive and more unpredictable for us all.

Full Stack Spies examines the dynamic, interdependent relationships that hackers, cyber defenders, tech giants and nation states forge, leverage and exploit to amass cyber power against a wide range of targets in geopolitics, global trade and finance, the armed forces, and critical infrastructure. But this jostling for cyber dominance makes spying online harder--and, more crucially, undermines long-term trust in cyber space, destabilising the foundations of digital societies.