The War on Cyberterrorism

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of international law enforcement within the War onCyberterrorism. Hybrid conflicts have replaced the traditional ones, and new threats have emerged in cyberspace, which has become a virtual battlefield. Cyber threats -cybercrimes, cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare -are a major concern for Western governments, especially for the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The international community has begun to consider cyberattacks as a form of terrorism, to which the same measures apply. Because the term "terrorism" is ambiguous and legaly undefined, there is no consensus on a definition of the derivative term "cyberterrorism", which is left to the unilateral interpretations of states. Pretending to consider the cyberspace domain as traditional domains, and claiming to apply IHL for the sole purpose of lawfully using armed forces in contrast to cyberterrorism is a stretch. This paper addresses the question of whether or not current laws of war and international humanitarian law apply to cyber domain, and gives some recommendations on how to tackle this issue.

An Explorative Study into the Importance of Defining and Classifying Cyber Terrorism in the United Kingdom

“…This has been escalated during the recent COVID pandemic where life has made a remarkable shift towards online activity, placing individuals at a much higher risk of being vulnerable to cyber terrorist activities [2]. Although there has been considerable research focusing on how cyber capabilities facilitate terrorism [3][4][5], there is nonetheless significant disagreement surrounding what definitions and approaches should be used unanimously to facilitate in preventing, detecting, investigating, and prosecuting cyber terrorist threats by key stakeholders in the United Kingdom (UK) such as the police, prosecution services and policy makers and international stakeholders too.…”

The Russian Influence Strategy in Its Contested Neighbourhood

“…In the opinion of the current author the term "warfare" is not synonym of "armed conflict" defined by the Hague and Geneva Conventions and therefore it does not fit to operations in virtual domains (Marsili, 2019). Information and influence operations (IIO) are located in a "gray zone" 6 between peace and war which includes ambiguous contexts such as hybrid conflicts (Schreier 2015: 19, 23;Gorkowski, 2018: 26;Cordey, 2019: 10, 19) and below the threshold of war (Theohary, 2018: 2;2000).…”

Military Emerging Disruptive Technologies: Compliance with International Law and Ethical Standards

“…Therefore, the hypothesis of considering a cyberattack as a traditional attack seems to be excluded. these doubts have already been expressed in several publications (Marsili 2019(Marsili , 2021b. Nevertheless, the U.S. and NATO doctrine considers a cyberattack equivalent to a kinetic one (Marsili 2019).…”

“…these doubts have already been expressed in several publications (Marsili 2019(Marsili , 2021b. Nevertheless, the U.S. and NATO doctrine considers a cyberattack equivalent to a kinetic one (Marsili 2019). The legal framework seems blurred, and we wonder which law applies.…”