Given this year’s news cycle, you might already have forgotten that, this past December, news broke that Russia had conducted a major hack of U.S. intelligence agencies. Around the same time, a smaller story about government-led hacking in the Middle East came out. Saudi Arabia, it was alleged, was spying on journalists from Al Jazeera, the state-funded media network of its rival Qatar, using Israeli spyware. Both stories involved cyber-infiltration and data theft. But the stories had a more important commonality: No one seemed especially shocked by them.
The Gulf is rapidly becoming a laboratory for the ethics and practices of hybrid warfare. A new report (which one of us directed) from the Middle East and North Africa Forum at the University of Cambridge explores the drivers, and the direction, of the Gulf’s evolving strategy. With conflicting religious agendas and rival international backers, Saudi Arabia and Iran have spent almost 30 years locked in geopolitical struggle. Both have sought to build leverage over one another using methods short of war—backing regional proxies, amplifying the voices of the other’s political opposition groups, and, increasingly, using targeted cyberattacks. For both, cyberwarfare offers an ethical out—it kills less people than conventional war—but can cause great havoc and disruption.
