Geopolitical Liminality in Cyberspace
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci Writing from prison, Antonio Gramsci described the world he lived in as liminal and unstable – seeing an old order fade and a new yet to emerge. He called these “times of monsters”: […]
Cyber Operations and Critical Infrastructure in Conflict
This session provides an intelligence‐based assessment of state actor cyber operations against critical infrastructure before and during armed conflict. Using the Venezuelan energy case and lessons from Russian operations in Ukraine, it examines what cyber tools actually achieved, their limits, and why the Venezuelan case is not directly comparable to Europe. The talk offers a […]
Beneath Arrakis:Unmasking Hydra Saiga’s Covert Operation
On a desert world, Hydra Saiga mines “spicetelligence” from government, defense, and infrastructure targets across Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. This APT aligns with its sponsor’s geopolitical interests—specifically water and gas strategy—while largely evading Western scrutiny. We will explore their TTPs and targets using a custom tool that intercepts the actor’s Telegram-as-a-C2 […]
Sovereignty by Design: Europe’s SaaS Resilience Playbook
Europe’s digital sovereignty agenda is legitimate and necessary. But the market cannot deliver homegrown solutions fast enough — spreading investment too thin risks building a monoculture that makes adversaries’ jobs easier. Meanwhile, Baltic cable sabotage, service termination by decree, and an unpredictable transatlantic relationship have turned theoretical cut-off scenarios into planning realities. This session delivers […]
Single Country of Failure is the metric you’re missing
Your redundant architecture has a blind spot the size of a continent. While you’ve eliminated every Single Point of Failure, your vendor ecosystem may be balanced on a single jurisdictional chokepoint, one sanctions package away from going dark. We call this the New Dutch Disease: just as a booming gas sector hollows out the rest […]
What Yesterday’s Cyber Ops Tell Us About Tomorrow
1. Opening: Europe on the digital frontline: from spillover to systemic exposure 2. The DynoWiper case (Poland, 2025): destructive cyber as strategic signalling 3. From cyber to hybrid warfare: the convergence of cyber, AI, drones and information operations 4. The Ukraine doctrine: how Sandworm operationalised cyber as a wartime capability 5. Spillover into the EU: […]
Staying in Control When Geopolitics Becomes the Crisis
Geopolitics has long been treated as background noise in cybersecurity, relevant for strategic discussions, but rarely for day‐to‐day operational decision‐making. That assumption no longer holds. Rising geopolitical tensions increasingly spill into the digital domain, affecting public organizations not only through cyberattacks, but also via sanctions, legal orders, supplier disruption, and political pressure on technology providers. […]
Geopolitical Resilience: A Central Bank Perspective
Geopolitical tensions increasingly materialise in the cyber domain, directly affecting financial stability, critical infrastructures and public institutions. For central banks, this creates a unique resilience challenge that spans monetary policy, financial supervision and internal operations.
European Security: Technological Innovation in Warfare
Since Russian forces launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has caused immense human suffering and fundamentally altered Europe’s security landscape. Ukrainian sovereignty has been sustained through unprecedented and costly technological innovation and adaptation on the battlefield. The widespread use of drones and other uncrewed systems, the digitisation of command structures, cyber capabilities, and […]
Exploitation at the seams: hybrid threats
The boundary between cybercrime and state-sponsored cyber operations has never been more contested or more consequential. With the ever increasing impact of cyber incidents, fueled by a broad range of increasingly hybrid adversaries, we are facing a multifaceted problem. The mingling of criminal and state actors comes with significant challenges, especially how the Dutch cyber […]