What is it like to simultaneously fight a cyber war and a shooting war? How does Russia fight in the cyber domain, and how was Ukraine so resilient? What lessons can the United States and allies learn from that resilience? Next Peak's Greg Rattray joins CSIS host, Emily Harding, to speak on lessons learned from the Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative.
Next Peak's Intelligent Cyber Research (ICR), inspired by co-founder Greg Rattray’s vision to merge geopolitical intelligence with cyber insight, is ready to empower organizations to make informed, forward-looking decisions. On September 19, 2025 Next Peak officially launched ICR, announcing a series of offerings designed to help global organizations secure against geopolitical cyber risks and uplift their strategic thinking.
On January 25th, 2024, a major Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack temporarily disabled the digital infrastructure of Naftogaz Group, Ukraine’s largest state-owned energy company. On the same day, an attack took other major companies offline—including the national postal service provider Ukrposhta, transport safety agency DSBT, and Ukrainian state railway Ukrazaliznytsia. Nevertheless, Ukrainian companies were able to restore access to their digital infrastructure rapidly, reaching full access within a few days.
| Written By Seungmin (Helen) Lee for World Politics Review | In recent years, artificial intelligence has emerged as the most significant driver of global data center demand. Four tech giants—Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta and Microsoft—currently control 42 percent of U.S. data center capacity, and these companies spent $155 billion on AI infrastructure in the first half of 2025.
For the last decade, Next Peak co-founder Greg Rattray has been developing an idea around his passion for the intersection of geopolitics and cyber. Today, as geopolitical risks are increasing from emerging wars, domestic extremism, and erosion of global institutions, Next Peak officially launches a new branch: Intelligent Cyber Research (ICR)—finally bringing Greg’s idea into fruition.
| By Seungmin (Helen) Lee | With the explosion in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers to support the exponential integration of AI into businesses, operations, governments, and daily lives, the cybersecurity of AI data centers is becoming increasingly important. Given that AI data centers host AI models, weights, and training data, these centers face an expanded set of threats—particularly related to hardware, model, and geopolitical security. This report recommends a new framework to develop more cyber-secure AI data centers.
| By Seungmin (Helen) Lee | As AI innovation and development took off in South Korea, so did unethical and unreliable use of the technology. The country’s AI legal framework that passed in December 2024 was designed to place guardrails around the future of AI. However, its impact is yet to be determined.
We interviewed Ian Pelekis and Seungmin (Helen) Lee from Next Peak, part of the Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative (CDAC). CDAC is a group of leading cybersecurity companies, former U.S. government officials, and top U.S. cyber defense leaders who came together to provide operational cyber defense assistance to Ukraine during the 2022 Russian invasion. Currently, CDAC works in collaboration with participating private sector cybersecurity organizations to meet cyber defense aid requests from Ukrainian government ministries and state-owned organizations.
| By Gregory Rattray and Seungmin (Helen) Lee | In an era of international instability, the safety and resiliency of our digital existence faces deep challenges. Such instability has undermined the ability of governments to counter aggression in cyberspace. In this growing vacuum, the conduct of cyber defense assistance by the private sector will both change and grow in increasing importance.
| Written By Seungmin (Helen) Lee and Michelle J. Lee | Nations fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) nationalism – the sentiment that a nation must develop its own technology to serve its interests – are racing to achieve AI supremacy. Undoubtedly, the United States and China are at the forefront, adding yet another battleground to their increasingly tense relationship.