A study of how states can lawfully react to malicious cyber conduct, taking into account the problem of timely attribution.

"With the frequency of widely reported malicious cyber operations carried out by states steadily increasing, more and more policymakers and scholars have started deliberating how states should be allowed to, respond when their critical infrastructures or other legally protected interests fall victim to a significant cybersecurity incident triggered by an adversarial actor's conduct. Focusing on 'active cyber defences' such as 'hacking back' and other unilateral remedies, ranging from publicly calling out another state for having engaged in malicious cyber conduct to imposing sanctions, the book closely examines three unilateral remedies found in customary international law that a targeted state may invoke in order to justify its response: self-defence, countermeasures, and necessity. Taking into account the pervasive problem of attributing cyber operations to the responsible actor in a reliable and above all timely manner, the study seeks to unfold the principal legal challenges that states face when applying rules of current international law to questions of transnational cybersecurity. The book concludes with some principled suggestions for future norm development for cyberspace"--

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the international law applicable to cyber operations. It is grounded in international law, but is also of interest for non-legal researchers, notably in political science and computer science. Outside academia, it will appeal to legal advisors, policymakers, and military organisations.

Tallinn Manual 2.0 expands on the highly influential first edition by extending its coverage of the international law governing cyber operations to peacetime legal regimes. The product of a three-year follow-on project by a new group of twenty renowned international law experts, it addresses such topics as sovereignty, state responsibility, human rights, and the law of air, space, and the sea. Tallinn Manual 2.0 identifies 154 'black letter' rules governing cyber operations and provides extensive commentary on each rule. Although Tallinn Manual 2.0 represents the views of the experts in their personal capacity, the project benefitted from the unofficial input of many states and over fifty peer reviewers.

In a world of increasing dependence on information technology, the prevention of cyberattacks on a nation's important computer and communications systems and networks is a problem that looms large. Given the demonstrated limitations of passive cybersecurity defense measures, it is natural to consider the possibility that deterrence might play a useful role in preventing cyberattacks against the United States and its vital interests. At the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Research Council undertook a two-phase project aimed to foster a broad, multidisciplinary examination of strategies for deterring cyberattacks on the United States and of the possible utility of these strategies for the U.S. government. The first phase produced a letter report providing basic information needed to understand the nature of the problem and to articulate important questions that can drive research regarding ways of more effectively preventing, discouraging, and inhibiting hostile activity against important U.S. information systems and networks. The second phase of the project entailed selecting appropriate experts to write papers on questions raised in the letter report. A number of experts, identified by the committee, were commissioned to write these papers under contract with the National Academy of Sciences. Commissioned papers were discussed at a public workshop held June 10-11, 2010, in Washington, D.C., and authors revised their papers after the workshop. Although the authors were selected and the papers reviewed and discussed by the committee, the individually authored papers do not reflect consensus views of the committee, and the reader should view these papers as offering points of departure that can stimulate further work on the topics discussed. The papers presented in this volume are published essentially as received from the authors, with some proofreading corrections made as limited time allowed.

The result of a three-year project, this manual addresses the entire spectrum of international legal issues raised by cyber warfare.

Rethinking Cyber Warfare provides a fresh understanding of the role that digital disruption plays in contemporary international security and proposes a new approach to more effectively restrain and manage cyberattacks.