State-nexus cyberspace attack and information operations can showcase how classically emotional motives, namely national pride and leadership vanity, can play an outsized role in operation formulation and execution. This contrasts with the presumption that, typically, state-nexus operations have objectives that would be considered dispassionate and rational in atraditional strategic sense. Among the many dynamics affecting the institutions likely conducting state-nexus operations, national pride and leadership vanity are among the most volatile and likely to drive strategically irrational actions that may even end up being counterproductive for the initiating state.
Such drivers can often override concerns that state threat actors are typically conceived of as having to accommodate in their operational planning (e.g., clandestinity, geopolitical consequences of exposure, balancing “action versus access” equities, etc.). Illustrative cases include Russian information operations targeting international sporting bodies, the North Korean cyberattack against Sony Pictures, and the alleged Iranian wiper attack against the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. These examples demonstrate how national pride or leadership vanity can contribute to activity and how emotionally-driven activity presents particular risks and heightened potential costs for threat actors. They also suggest what sort of actions or events in the future could spur other state-nexus actors to engage in “vanity operations”.
Given that a substantial element of threat intelligence analysis can be understanding adversarial states’ international positions and perceived national policy preferences, it is critical for professionals in the field to understand how such vanity operations are not only possible but, in some circumstances, even likely. This is especially true as cyberspace operations continue to evolve into a perceptibly safer means for states to settle "vanity" scores without crossing traditional escalatory thresholds, thus reducing the risk of retaliation.