While much focus has remained on the concept of cyberwar, what we have been observing in actual cyber behaviour are campaigns comprised of linked cyber operations, with the specific objective of achieving strategic outcomes without the need of armed attack. These campaigns are not simply transitory clever tactics, but strategic in intent. This article examines strategic cyber competition and reveals how the adoption of a different construct can pivot both explanation and policy prescription. Strategy must be unshackled from the presumption that it deals only with the realm of coercion, militarised crisis, and war in cyberspace.

Four key events are addressed in this briefing note. Key event one is the announcement in April and May of 2017 with the launch of two supercomputers in Canada (Graham at University of Waterloo; Cedar at Simon Fraser University) and a third (Niagara at The University of Toronto) using Compute Canada’s Resources Allocation (Compute Canada, 2018a). Key event two is the announcement that Huawei Canada is building Graham’s operating system (Feldman, 2017). Key event three entails CSIS being warned by the US Senators (Rep. Sen Marco Rubio and Dem. Sen Mark Warner) about the possibility of China and Russia spying on Canada. Key event four, the United States has reportedly banned sales of Huawei products on US military bases (Bronskill, 2018; Collins, 2018). This briefing note is particularly relevant as Compute Canada is now preparing for 2019 resource allocation; there may be a raised/elevated security risk of economic espionage intellectual property theft and abusing education access privileges which needs to be considered (SFU Innovates Staff, 2018).

This document describes the convergence and integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and services of the Antigua and Barbuda Government.

In late 2001, after the establishment of the interim government, Afghanistan stepped into new horizons of political and socio-economic rehabilitation and reconstruction. The subsequent transitional and the elected Afghan government introduced new legislations which assisted private companies to make investments in the country and provide various services including telecommunications and ICT services for the people of Afghanistan. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) was the first among the sectoral government entities in Afghanistan to design new strategies and policies, enabling private sector to make huge investment in the telecommunication and IT sectors. In 2009, MCIT established the first Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) in Afghanistan and it was officially named as AFCERT. The mandate of AFCERT was to fight against cyber threats and crimes and provide awareness and solutions on cyber security to the government and private sector. In its first two years of operation, AFCERT submitted an official report to the MCIT senior management regarding an upsurge in the cyber and electronic crimes in the country. In order to fight the said crimes, it was vital to conduct a risk assessment of all government ICT infrastructures and come up with a solution to mitigate those risks. AFCERT’s proposal on preparing a draft of Cyber Security Strategy for the country was accepted by the MCIT and ICT Council and to this end the MCIT and ICT Council established a committee. In 2012 the first awareness workshop on drafting the NCSA was held in ICTI Institute, supported and funded by the US Department of Commerce. It was a 4 day workshop and all government CIOs, ICT heads, private sector and academia participated and studied and analyzed various strategies from different countries. The NCSA committee was chaired by Information Systems Security Directorate of MCIT and held its regular meetings and assessments for one year. After a series of assessments and recommendations, the NCSA committee finalized and submitted the first draft of the strategy in July 2014 to the MCIT and ICT Council to review and adapt its action plan.

TOPCIT ESSENCE is published to provide learning materials for TOPCIT examinees. The TOPCIT Division desires the TOPCIT examinees who want to acquire the necessary practical competency in the field of ICTto exploit as self-directed learning materials.