The Distinctiveness of Public Response to Cyber and Kinetic Attacks

• In Event: Public Opinion About International Events and Organizations

Abstract

In December 2020, the United States government announced that they were victim to one of the largest hacks in history (SolarWinds) and swiftly attributed the cyber exploit to Russia. Subsequently, in a striking instance of bipartisan support, elected officials from both sides of the aisle, including President-(then)elect Joe Biden and Senator Mitt Romney, called for a retaliatory response to the incident. However, to date, it is still unclear what actions that response should entail.

The debate over the appropriate response to the SolarWinds hack - and its public nature- highlights the need to better understand the consequences of cyberattacks in the public domain, and how governments will respond to these actions. In seeking to understand how states choose to respond to these attacks, one important consideration is the role of the public. Specifically, it is important to understand how the public reacts to cyberattacks and whether and how this is different from their response to analogous physical attacks.

Utilizing a conjoint survey experiment with a representative sample of 2000 Americans, we identify when the public supports escalation in response to cyberattacks. Each treatment varies across dimensions of type of attack (cyber or kinetic), scale of attack (information theft, financial theft, infrastructure damage, loss of life), attribution certainty (high or low), and attack timing (recently or last year). Additionally, we field a battery of questions designed to test distinctions between cyber and kinetic attacks to understand what mechanisms underpin those attitudes: the covert and clandestine nature of cyber, the novelty of cyber, a perception of individual vulnerability with cyber enabled technologies, the lack of clearly established norms around cyber usage, and perceived offensive advantage. Ultimately, we advance an understanding of under what conditions the public supports retaliation for cyber incidents, how this varies from comparable kinetic attacks, and what mechanisms underpin these attitudes.

Authors

• Kathryn Hedgecock

• Lauren Sukin, Stanford University

• Leah Matchett