The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence has published the Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Cyber Conflict: Securing Tomorrow. Edited by C. Kwan, B. M. Åkesson, M. Cvetko, A. Dollimore, and M. Tolppa, the volume brings together 21 peer-reviewed papers on the legal, strategic, and technical dimensions of cyber conflict.
In the foreword, CCDCOE Director Tõnis Saar writes that recent events should be heeded as a wake-up call for all actors to recalibrate their cyber risk and exposure in the current era of sudden geopolitical escalation. Since the start of 2026, the integration of cyber effects with other domains has demonstrated a critical role in multidomain operations. Cyber power alone cannot yet seize terrain or physically cross a river. Its value lies in shaping the environment so that other forces can.
The papers span law, strategy, and technology
The legal track tackles questions that have taken on urgent real-world significance: the legal status of civilian volunteers in cyber defence, the protection of humanitarian organisations in cyberspace, and the governance of military AI procurement under international humanitarian law. Two papers address the persistent challenge of attribution, including a proposal to leverage the new UN Convention against Cybercrime to strengthen Western attribution practice.
The strategy and policy track covers NATO supply chain governance, cyber threat intelligence, and the use of cyber operations for geopolitical signalling, drawing on the Iran-Israel rivalry and Russian interference in recent European elections. Ukraine features as a live source of research, including work on cloud migration as a wartime resilience strategy for critical infrastructure.
The technical track presents AI-enabled approaches to cyber defence, including multi-agent reinforcement learning for autonomous cyber operations, agentic AI for IoT security, and a three-and-a-half-year longitudinal study of DDoS activity during the Russia-Ukraine war.
All papers were subject to double-blind peer review in accordance with IEEE procedures by an international review committee of experts from government, military, academia, and industry.
A printed edition was distributed to CyCon 2026 participants. The volume is available online in CCDCOE Library.