ABSTRACT

The increasing demand for cybersecurity has been met by a global supply, namely, a rapidly growing market of private companies that offer their services worldwide. Cybersecurity firms develop both defensive (e.g. protection of own networks) and offensive innovations (e.g. development of zero days), whereby they provide operational capacities and expertise to overstrained states. Yet, there is hardly any systematic knowledge of these new cybersecurity warriors to date. Who are they, and how can we differentiate them? This contribution to the special issue seeks to give an initial overview of the coordination between public and private actors in cyberspace. I thus explore these new private security forces by mapping the emerging market for these goods and services. The analysis develops a generic typology from a newly generated data set of almost one hundred companies. As a result of this stock-taking exercise, I suggest how to theorize public-private coordination as network relationships in order to provide a number of preliminary insights into the rise of this ‘brave new industry’ and to point out critical implications for the future of private security forces.

摘要

全球供应满足了对网络安全日益增长的需求，即在全球范围内提供服务的私营公司的快速增长市场。网络安全公司开发防御性（例如保护自己的网络）和进攻性创新（例如开发零日），从而为过度紧张的国家提供运营能力和专业知识。然而，迄今为止，几乎没有任何关于这些新网络安全战士的系统知识。他们是谁，我们如何区分他们？这篇对特刊的投稿旨在初步概述网络空间中公共和私人行为者之间的协调。因此，我通过绘制这些商品和服务的新兴市场来探索这些新的私人安全力量。该分析从近百家公司的新生成数据集中开发了一个通用类型。作为这次评估的结果，我建议如何将公私合作理论化为网络关系，以便为这个“勇敢的新行业”的兴起提供一些初步见解，并指出对未来的重要影响私人保安部队。