WESF: "Companies Can Also Be Targets" as Experts Urge Stronger Cyber Resilience in South Korea

Swope: KPS is crucial for resilience and could benefit the U.S.-Korea alliance
Gibson: Preventing every cyberattack is unrealistic; priority should be on mission continuity

The growing use of private-sector technologies such as artificial intelligence and commercial satellites for national security could turn companies themselves into targets, two U.S. security experts warned. For South Korea, which faces persistent cyber threats, the priority should be building systems capable of continuing their missions after an attack rather than assuming every disruption can be prevented, they said.

Clayton Swope, Deputy Director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) (left), and Karen Gibson, former Deputy Director of the U.S. National Intelligence, are being interviewed by The Asia Business Daily at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seoul. Photo by Jo Yongjun

Karen Gibson, former Deputy Director of U.S. National Intelligence, and Clayton Swope, Deputy Director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), spoke separately to The Asia Business Daily while visiting Seoul for the 2026 World Emerging Security Forum on September 9.

Swope warned that companies operating commercial satellites could face greater risks as their services become increasingly integrated into military operations. “Companies that are building satellites and operating them, they should know what they're getting into,” Swope said. “They essentially are providing a capability that's used for military purposes.”

Even satellites that provide only part of their services to governments or militaries could become targets in a conflict, he said. “They should be aware that in a conflict they will be targeted just like a government system, maybe even easier to target a company as opposed to a government,” Swope said.

Gibson pointed to what she called “the dual use nature of artificial intelligence and cyber,” saying governments do not have a monopoly on developing such technologies. “Most of these capabilities are going to come out of the private sector because the government has some expertise and access problems,” Gibson said. “The private sector does take on an increasingly important role in national security.”

That growing role makes sustained cooperation between governments and technology companies essential, she said. Gibson cautioned that governments could not effectively regulate technologies they did not fully understand without working closely with those developing them. “It needs to be a partnership between the two,” she said.

Asked what capabilities South Korea should prioritize amid a series of cyberattacks targeting government networks, including systems linked to national security, Gibson said preventing every attack was an unrealistic goal. “I think it is not realistic to think that you can entirely prevent cyberattacks,” she said.

Rather than trying to eliminate disruption altogether, Gibson said South Korea should build resilient systems that would allow it to continue carrying out its missions even when some capabilities were disrupted.

She cited “redundancy, dispersion, alternate communication methods, proliferated space architecture, hardened facilities, distributed logistics, rapid reconstitution” as measures that could strengthen resilience, along with the ability to continue operating in a degraded environment.

Swope also pointed to the Korean Positioning System (KPS) as an important way to strengthen resilience in space-based positioning and navigation. “I do think KPS, the positioning system that Korea is looking at developing, is really important to have resiliency so that if one system, for whatever reason, can't be accessed, there's another,” he said.

He said the benefits would extend beyond South Korea. “That will be a benefit not just to Korea but the alliance and the United States would derive value from that as well. And other regional partners.”

Swope said the same approach should apply to space security cooperation between South Korea and the United States. Using the analogy of stacking slices of Swiss cheese, he described layers of resilience that could draw on capabilities from South Korea, the United States, private companies and European or Japanese entities. “I stack up these layers of resilience and I hope that all the holes don't line up,” Swope said.

He said the goal was to keep adding redundancy so that capabilities would remain available even if some layers were lost. “How many ways can we add another layer of redundancy so that if we start to lose these layers, we still have something left?” he said.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.