The United States (US), its allies, and other partners are engaged in long-term strategic competition with Russia and China—near-peer adversaries adept at operating in the grey zone of international law, where the precise contours of the law are difficult to discern. They do so to complicate our response options, in part to avoid provoking a direct military response. Increasingly, cyberspace is that grey zone, a domain in which Russia, China, and other adversaries such as Iran and North Korea mount cyber operations ranging from cyber-enabled espionage, theft, and propaganda campaigns to significantly more disruptive and destructive operations. In particular, they often leverage non-state actors—cyber proxies—to do their bidding because proxies further complicate legal and policy assessments of the operations. And those assessments determine the response options available to victim states.
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