The first session of the Virtual Routes Colloquium Winter/Spring series hosts Eugenio Lilli from University College Dublin. Alessia Tortolini from University of Bologna will act as discussant.

This session discusses Iran’s increasingly assertive use of offensive cyber-operations (OCOs) and their integration into its military strategy. It argues that the rise of Iranian OCOs is best understood through strategic alignment: the convergence between Iran’s cyber-behavior and the logics of asymmetry, ambiguity, escalation control, and strategic depth that have long characterized Iranian strategic thinking. To assess this explanation, the article reviews the literature on Iranian OCOs, discusses the four core logics underpinning Iran’s strategy, and tests strategic alignment against both theoretical insights from the cyber-literature and empirical evidence from two cases: the 2020 operations against Israel’s water infrastructure and the 2022 attacks on Albania’s government websites. A separate section examines the June 2025 war between Iran and Israel, highlighting the limits of integrating OCOs into fast-paced wartime operations. The article concludes that both theory and practice corroborate strategic alignment as a plausible explanation for Iran’s growing reliance on OCOs.

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