Studying international aspects of cyber security requires taking into
account both technical and social dimensions. However, the majority of
cyber security research has only focused on the technical dimension. In
my work, I study international cyber-security using a socio-technical
approach that combines data science techniques, computational models,
and network science techniques.

I will start by presenting my work on empirically identifying factors
behind international variation in cyber attack exposure and hosting. I
use data from 10 million computers worldwide provided by a key
anti-virus vendor. The results of this work indicate that reducing
attack exposure and hosting in the most affected countries requires
addressing both social and technical issues such as corruption and
computer piracy. Then, I will present a computational methodology to
assess countries’ cyber warfare capabilities. The methodology captures
political factors that motivate countries to develop these capabilities
and technical factors that enable such development. Together, these
projects show that bridging the social and technical dimensions of cyber
security can improve our understanding of the dynamics of international
cyber security and have a real-world impact.