The Politics of Incident Response

What makes a cyber ‘incident’ an incident?

This project draws from International Political Economy and Science, Technology & Society (STS) studies to explore how cybersecurity imaginaries about incidents are contested in practice, this entails exploring constitutive character of security expertise in stabilising both technical and knowledge infrastructures underpinning cybersecurity. In this regard, I am both concerned with those that maintain the security, stability and resilience of networks and the politics that are often concealed or encoded into the everyday interactions of expert security communities with governments in the management of networks.

I depart from the concept of social and socio-technical imaginaries to conceptualise cybersecurity imaginaries and explore the intrinsic tensions that permeate the mundane incident response security operations. Thus, this project is not only committed to revealing infrastructures, but exposing key exercises of power embedded in the stabilisation (or breakdown) of security of networked systems. Situated a context of emerging regulation of data flows and critical infrastructures, exploitation of vulnerabilities by both public and private actors and confusion over responsibilities in national cybersecurity governance, this project is thus concerned with the investigation of the ‘emergence’, rather than ‘existence’, of contemporary forms of power through the analysis of national Computer Incident Response Teams and how they interact with other parts of the government. To do so, I look specifically at the politics and context of Brazil.