Tim Haines

Tim Haines is the Strategic Analysis lead at SecAlliance, a European Cyber Threat Intelligence provider. He has been an intelligencer for over 25 years, the last fifteen of which have been within the cyber domain. Working predominantly at the interface between geopolitical developments and cyber threats, Tim maintains a keen interest in the impact of cognitive biases on cyber threat intelligence processes.

‍

Talk: Chinese Pre-Placement Activity – Preparation for War, or Deterrence?

A significant spike in pre-placement activity by Chinese APT groups against Western Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) has been widely interpreted as an indication that China is preparing to launch cyber enabled sabotage operations in the event of a military conflict between the US and China. This interpretation is logically sound and may well be correct. However, an alternative hypothesis should also be considered: China is pro-actively engaging in Cyber enabled deterrence, designed to prevent Western offensive actions. This hypothesis is almost entirely overlooked in media commentary. This presentation is based on the use of a simple analytical technique, ‘Red Team SWOT / Breaking-the-mirror’ to better understand pre-placement activity from the Chinese perspective and evaluate both hypotheses.