Assessing Information Ecosystems: How Governments Can Get Ahead of Hybrid Threats

Csernatoni and Wanless make a pointed methodological argument: the “hybrid threats” framework, while politically useful for coalition-building, obscures more than it illuminates when it comes to understanding how adversaries actually operate. By treating diverse phenomena — cyber intrusions, disinformation, economic coercion, infrastructure interference — as a single category, policymakers lose the analytical precision needed to design effective responses. The authors propose the information ecosystems lens as a more tractable alternative: one that maps vulnerabilities as interconnected systems rather than discrete threat types.

The practical implication is significant for European policymakers. A whole-of-society approach to resilience building requires understanding how threats cascade across domains — how a cyber operation creates the conditions for an information operation, which in turn amplifies economic pressure. This paper provides the conceptual scaffolding for that kind of integrated assessment. It should be read alongside Wanless’s earlier work on measuring national information ecosystems as the methodological foundation for the framework proposed here.