(iPoster) Temporal Co-Movements of Cyber Operations and Political Violence

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security III

Abstract

Public discourse on hybrid warfare assumes that cyber operations are synchronized with battlefield actions, either as precursors of kinetic operations or as complementary coercive tools. However, empirical scientific evidence for such temporal interdependence remains limited. This study examines whether state-targeted cyber operations and politically motivated physical violence co-evolve during wartime using daily event data from the European Repository of Cyber Incidents (EuRepoC) and ACLED.
Focusing on the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Iran conflicts between 2020 and 2025, this analysis applies a series of vector autoregressive models is applied to assess whether cyber attacks predict, follow, or remain independent from kinetic events, and vice versa, while the US-China rivalry serves as a benchmark for cyber dynamics during peacetime. Results show strong temporal autocorrelation within both cyber and political violence, but provide little evidence that cyber operations systematically drive kinetic events. Instead, cyber activity appears to be shaped by political events and holidays, with minor effects suggesting that kinetic violence may precede cyber campaigns against a nation-state.
Taken together, these findings support theoretical arguments about the operational constraints of cyber attacks, including the “subversive trilemma” and long planning horizons. In addition, they highlight the autonomy of hackers from state military structures with regard to attack timing.

Author

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