The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently announced its Digital and Cyberspace Policy program is launching a Cyber Operations Tracker, a database of all publicly-known state-sponsored incidents that have occurred since 2005, in order to gain a better understanding of the current cyber threat landscape.
Building off of previous work conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and developer Florian Roth, the database contains approximately 200 entries of state-sponsored cyberattacks or threat actors with publicly available data.
CFR stated the database can help answer questions including which nations are being spied upon, how many times the North Korean regime has been publicly denounced for its cyber operations, and finding information on the threat actor known as Equation Group, among other topics.
The council added that it identified 16 different countries that are suspected of being responsible for cyber operations including known entities in China, Russia, and the United States, along with newer actors in Mexico, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan.
Prior to 2014, nations rarely publicly called out one another for reported cyberattacks. However, CFR data showed that the United States began calling out nations more frequently around the same time it indicted five members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on industrial espionage charges in May 2014.
The council noted that its dataset was still a work in progress and invited cybersecurity researchers and companies to contribute to their database when they identify new state-sponsored cyber incidents.