ANALYST · DOSSIER
Rafael Quintero
Director · Geopolitical Risk
Foreign-correspondent background, then a decade at the Council on Foreign Relations covering cyber-statecraft. Now leads SCRYER’s integration of geopolitical context into technical threat analysis.
- Council on Foreign Relations · Senior Fellow
- Reuters · Foreign Desk
Rafael Quintero came to cybersecurity through the front door of foreign correspondence. He spent years on Reuters' foreign desk covering the overlap between statecraft and infrastructure before a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations turned that perspective into a formal academic practice.
His decade at CFR produced some of the most read analyses of cyber-statecraft in the English language, including the 2026 Foreign Affairs cover essay "When Cyber Becomes Statecraft." The essay argued that the traditional separation between intelligence analysis and cyber threat intelligence was a bureaucratic artifact that no longer served the practitioners who depended on it.
At SCRYER, Rafael directs the Geopolitical Risk practice. He is the reason SCRYER's technical briefings arrive with foreign ministry context attached, a detail that distinguishes SCRYER's work from every pure-technical competitor in the market.
“Cyber operations are statecraft by other means. You cannot understand the intrusion without understanding the foreign ministry behind it.”
RECENT BRIEFINGS
Selected work by this analyst.
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