As a consequence of the Internet becoming an increasingly crucial domain for international security and economic prosperity, many governments across the world have started to appoint special ambassadors for cyberspace. Unlike traditional diplomats, cyber ambassadors’ geographic and topical areas of influence are less clearly defined. In this paper, we introduce a new global dataset that tracks the characteristics of all ambassadors to cyberspace, and present an argument based on classic signaling theory that explains when, why, and how governments opt to appoint such ambassadors. We argue that governments use the appointment of cyber ambassadors as a signal aimed at distinct domestic and international audiences, in order to provide information on a country’s cybersecurity capabilities, priorities, and intent. We also expect both the appointment and subsequent media attention given to cyber ambassadors to be dependent on the occurrence of high profile cyberattacks. To test our theoretical predictions we build a corpus of all news reports mentioning the ambassadors in our dataset, and use a combination of dictionary and topic modeling approaches to analyze the timing, frequency, and topics of the associated media coverage. Our findings have important implications for the study of signaling and interstate relations in cyberspace.