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What is cyberwar? - What is -- and what is not -- cyberwarfare?

Source: , 15/02/2021

Like other forms of warfare, cyberwarfare in its purest sense is usually defined as a conflict between states, not individuals. To qualify the attacks really should be of significant scale and severity.
If cyberwar is best understood as serious conflict between nations, that excludes a lot of the attacks that are regularly and incorrectly described as cyberwarfare.
Attacks by individual hackers, or even groups of hackers, would not usually be considered to be cyberwarfare, unless they are being aided and directed by a state. Still, in the murky world of cyberwarfare there are plenty of blurred lines: states providing support to hackers in order to create plausible deniability for their own actions is, however, a dangerously common trend.
One example: cyber crooks who crash a bank`s computer systems while trying to steal money would not be considered to be perpetrating an act of cyberwarfare, even if they come from a rival nation. But state-backed hackers doing the same thing to destabilise a rival state`s economy might well be considered so.
The nature and scale of the targets attacked is another indicator: defacing an individual company`s website is unlikely to be considered an act of cyberwarfare, but disabling the missile defence system at an airbase would certainly come at least close.
The weapons used are important, too -- cyberwar refers to digital attacks on computer systems: firing a missile at a data center would not be considered cyberwarfare, even if the data center contained government records. And using hackers to spy or even to steal data would not in itself be considered an act of cyberwarfare, and would instead come under the heading cyber espionage, something which is done by nearly all governments.
For sure there are many grey areas here (cyberwarfare is basically one big grey area anyway), but calling every hack an act of cyberwar is at best unhelpful and at its worst is scaremongering that could lead to dangerous escalation.
Cyberwarfare and the use of force
Why the who, what and how of cyberwarfare matters is because how these factors combine will help determine what kind of response a country can make to a cyberattack.
There is one key formal definition of cyberwarfare, which is a digital attack that is so serious it can be seen as the equivalent of a physical attack.
To reach this threshold, an attack on computer systems would have to lead to significant destruction or disruption, even loss of life. This is the significant threshold because under international law, countries are allowed to use force to defend themselves against an armed attack.
It follows then that, if a country were hit by a cyberattack of significant scale, the government is within its rights to strike back using the force of their standard military arsenal: to respond to hacking with missile strikes perhaps.
So far this has never happened -- indeed it`s not entirely clear if any attack has ever reached that threshold. Even if such an attack occurred it wouldn`t be assumed that the victim would necessarily strike back in such a way, but international law would not stand in the way of such a response.
That doesn`t mean attacks that fail to reach that level are irrelevant or should be ignored: it just means that the country under attack can`t justify resorting to military force to defend itself. There are plenty of other ways of responding to a cyberattack, from sanctions and expelling diplomats, to responding in kind, although calibrating the right response to an attack is often hard (see cyber deterrence, below).
What is the Tallinn Manual?
One reason that the legal status of cyberwarfare has been blurred is that there is no international law that refers to cyberwar, because it is such a new concept. But this doesn`t mean that cyberwarfare isn`t covered by law, it`s just that the relevant law is piecemeal, scattered, and often open to interpretation.
This lack of legal framework has resulted in a grey area that some states are very willing to exploit, using the opportunity to test out cyberwar techniques in the knowledge that other states are uncertain about how they could react under international law.
More recently that grey area has begun to shrink. A group of law scholars has spent years working to explain how international law can be applied to digital warfare. This work has formed the basis of the Tallinn Manual, a textbook prepared by the group and backed by the NATO-affiliated Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCoE) based in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, from which the manual takes its name.
The first version of the manual looked at the rare but most serious cyberattacks, the ones at the level of the use of force; the second edition released tried to build a legal framework around cyberattacks that do not reach the threshold of the use of force.
Aimed at legal advisers to governments, military, and intelligence agencies, the Tallinn Manual sets out when an attack is a violation of international law in cyberspace, and when and how states can respond to such assaults.
The manual consists of a set of guidelines -- 154 rules -- which set out how the lawyers think international law can be applied to cyberwarfare, covering everything from the use of cyber mercenaries to the targeting of medical units` computer systems.
The idea is that by making the law around cyberwarfare clearer, there is less risk of an attack escalating, because escalation often occurs when the rules are not clear and leaders overreact.
The second version of the manual, know as Tallinn 2.0, looks at the legal status of the various types of hacking and other digital attacks that occur on a daily basis during peacetime and looks at when a digital attack becomes a a violation of international law in cyberspace.
www.vsoftsystems.co.za

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