Cyberattacks have become an increasingly common part of modern life, disrupting hospitals, schools, businesses and governments around the world. But new research from Rice University suggests another threat may be emerging. Some cybercriminal communities are evolving beyond financial crime into politically motivated networks where extremist beliefs spread through anonymous online relationships.
Those findings earned Rice University alumnus Conner Joyce ’26 the 2026 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting.
Joyce studies how nonstate actors, including cybercriminals and terrorist organizations, use emerging technologies and how those technologies shape global security.
“There is a great deal of discussion about how to prevent the misuse of technology by malicious actors,” said Joyce, who recently finished his doctorate in political science at Rice. “With the advent of artificial intelligence, concerns have intensified.”
His award-winning research examined how political activity and radical behavior spread through cybercriminal communities. Rather than viewing hackers solely as financially motivated criminals, Joyce found that online interactions can create strong social bonds that facilitate the spread of political and extremist beliefs.
“Technology shapes more than what nonstate actors can do,” Joyce said. “It can also shape what these groups become.”
Joyce said those relationships can transform some cybercriminal communities into politically motivated groups capable of engaging in geopolitical disruption, offering new insight into how online networks evolve over time.
To conduct the research, Joyce analyzed nearly 400,000 website defacements, cyberattacks in which hackers replace webpage content with their own messages. Using machine learning, he examined more than 30 million words of text to identify political and radical messaging across hundreds of thousands of attacks.
“Manually coding a text dataset of this scale would have been prohibitively time consuming,” Joyce said. “Machine learning allowed me to systematically measure political and radical messaging across hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks.”
Joyce said his interest in cybersecurity began during a 2019 internship at the U.S. Embassy in Qatar. While following tensions between the United States and Iran, he was struck by the U.S. response after Iran shot down an American drone.
“I was surprised when the U.S. announced that it had retaliated with a cyberattack against Iran,” Joyce said. “This piqued my interest in cyberspace as a domain of conflict.”
Today, his broader research examines how emerging technologies, particularly AI, are reshaping international security. He studies how AI could lower barriers for terrorist organizations by providing operational guidance and technical expertise, while also making propaganda and recruitment efforts more effective through manipulated images, videos and other digital content.
Joyce also studies how governments can work together to address evolving cyber threats and develop international governance structures that keep pace with rapidly changing technology.
“I am hopeful that a better understanding of the risks posed by certain technologies will incentivize governments to work collaboratively toward global governance structures,” he said.
Receiving national recognition from APSA, Joyce said, reinforces the importance of continuing that work.
“It is especially rewarding to see my work resonate with a broad audience,” he said. “Moving forward, I will continue to investigate how the evolution of digital technologies is transforming the nature of security threats.”