Collateral Damage from Offensive Cyber Operations—A Systematic Literature Review

As offensive cyber operations have become more commonplace, cyber collateral damage (CCD) to society and to civilian infrastructure has expanded in impact and severity. Several research contexts, frameworks, and methods apply to these collateral effects, especially as they pertain to reducing them. To investigate and map this area of research, five leading scientific databases (Scopus, IEEE Xplore, Springer Link, ScienceDirect, and ProQuest) were searched for papers on CCD. From 716 search results, 74 relevant papers were selected. Using surface categories as well as thematic analysis, these were grouped into the main emergent categories of legal, ethical, targeting-oriented, and econometric papers, with each category showing a recent research trend. The papers were qualitatively assessed for importance and coverage and compared bibliographically to identify key papers and authors. Within the identified areas of research, significant gaps remain. While CCD is becoming increasingly well understood from a legal and operational perspective, this accounts only for a fraction of the civilian harm caused by offensive cyber operations. This study identifies potential pathways for the synthesis of the current research areas (targeting, taxonomy, econometrics) with broader definitions of collateral damage to include civilian harm. These include updating national cyber doctrines to require collateral damage estimates, as well as exploiting emerging open datasets to understand which cyber capabilities cause the greatest collateral effects. Finally, we observe that the research definitions and taxonomy of CCD differ widely and have been subjected to limited scrutiny and challenge to date.