Research · 28. December 2020

Addressing interactions and limitations, this article compares structural and activity-related differences between intelligence organizations of states and violent non-state actors (VNSA) and seeks to provide explanations and effects of the distinct setup.

Research · 27. December 2020

The First Battle of Bull Run in the American Civil War (1861), the Battle of Tannenberg in World War I (1914), the Battle of Midway in the Pacific War (1942), the Inchon Landing on the Korean peninsula (1950) or the Six-Day War around Israel (1967) – these are a few of the numerous examples where undoubted, heard and understood intelligence played a decisive role in violent conflicts. This article explains key factors to improve intelligence receptivity.

Research · 22. December 2020

The case of the 2016 German Foreign Intelligence Reform and the following constitutional complaint show one of these rare examples of well-aligned legal advocacy in a field where Human Rights’ defenders are usually bound by the intelligence agencies’ good will to cooperate. After a brief introduction to the field of Human Rights and intelligence, the article focuses on the lawsuit against the 2016 reform, provides an analysis of the advocacy strategy and closes with lessons learned.

Research · 03. December 2020

Throughout the years, the skyrocketing need for privacy developed into a race between those who sought for anonymity and those who have a profound interest to see through the privacy barriers. One famous instrument in the privacy toolbox is the decentralized, layered encryption approach of the “The Onion Router”, widely known as “Tor”.

Opinion · 30. November 2020

Describing the problems of cyber-buccaneering, this article uses the example of the famous, Russia-backed GameOver ZeuS botnet (GOZ) to explain the concept of a botnet and the GameOver ZeuS specific attack vector before elaborating on the cat-and-mouse game of successful takedowns and ineffective cybercrime persecution.

Policy Briefing · 27. October 2020

In 2015 the German Bundestag was attack - most certainly by a Russian hacking group. A combination of social engineering and trojan malware opened the door and allowed attackers to extract official documents of members of parliament, their parliamentary groups as well as the parliament’s administration. All of this, unrecognized – possibly over weeks. This article shows why the pain is not not gone and likely to return.