Panel, Conference Presentation
Coming In from the Cold: Espionage in Today's Geopolitics | Global Conference 2025
Milken InstituteSimon Radford, Darrell Blocker, Anthony Camerino, Christo Grozev, Katherine Mulhern, Jill Popelka, Nick Schifrin, Alyssa
- The current U.S. operational paradigm is viewed as obsolete regarding active war states, leaving corporations and C-suite executives as direct targets for state and non-state actors, with isolated entities like North Korea demonstrating that low-budget infiltration by nations including Russia, China, and Iran is highly feasible.
- Cyber threats are projected to increasingly leverage AI to match defensive capabilities, with 92% of novel social engineering attacks expected to originate via phishing emails, necessitating that corporations with insufficient open-source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities face significant disadvantages or become primary targets.
- Disinformation and social media proliferation are reshaping the threat landscape by facilitating the identification and recruitment of disgruntled employees, requiring governments to reallocate at least 30% of physical protection resources to online environments while corporations adopt both attack-centric and business-centric defense strategies.
- Intelligence sharing gaps between agencies and law enforcement are identified as critical vulnerabilities, exemplified by the potential to have halted the Salisbury poisonings seven years earlier had Russian database verification occurred, though investigative journalism and public shaming are anticipated to compel greater diligence in exposing malign operations.
- Illicit financial flows involving an estimated $100 to $150 billion lost to kleptocracy and corruption in nations like Bangladesh and Angola merge terrorism and organized crime funding with gray money, prompting plans by entities like Restitution Capital to assist post-conflict governments in establishing transparent sovereign wealth funds.
- Future scenarios predict that every large media organization will develop dedicated investigative units to expose government data protection failures, while Darktrace's acquisition of Cato aims to address the investigation of ephemeral data and a shifting threat landscape that demands proactive defense based on understanding network "normalcy."
- Global corporations are expected to face demands for information from nation states, creating a disadvantage for those refusing to share data, while cuts to aid budgets pose risks to basic services in Africa, where reversing illicit financial flows could theoretically transform the continent into a net creditor.