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Welcome to the Cyber Law Toolkit, an interactive online resource on international law and cyber operations.

About the project

The Cyber Law Toolkit is a dynamic interactive web-based resource for legal professionals who work with matters at the intersection of international law and cyber operations. The Toolkit may be explored and utilized in a number of different ways. At its heart, it consists of 19 hypothetical scenarios, to which more will be added in the future. Each scenario contains a description of cyber incidents inspired by real-world examples, accompanied by detailed legal analysis. The aim of the analysis is to examine the applicability of international law to the scenarios and the issues they raise. You can see all scenarios in the box immediately below – just click on any of them to follow the relevant analysis. In addition, you may want to explore the Toolkit by looking for keywords you’re interested in; by viewing its overall article structure; or by reading about individual real-world examples that serve as the basis of the Toolkit scenarios. Finally, you may want to use the search function in the top right corner of this page to look for specific words across all of the Toolkit content.

Cyber law scenarios

S01 Election interference	S02 Political espionage	S03 Power grid	S04 International organization
S05 Criminal investigation	S06 Enabling State	S07 Hacking tools	S08 Certificate authority
S09 Economic espionage	S10 Cyber weapons	S11 Surveillance tools	S12 Computer data
S13 Armed conflict	S14 Ransomware campaign	S15 Cyber deception	S16 High seas
S17 Collective responses	S18 Cyber operators	S19 Hate speech

Featured incident

In September 2019, Huawei released a media statement accusing the US government of “disrupting” Huawei’s business operations with “every tool at its disposal” including the launch of “cyber attacks to infiltrate Huawei's intranet and internal information systems”. The accusation came three days after a Wall Street Journal article which had reported about the US Department of Justice investigations into Huawei for alleged technology theft. In the Toolkit, Scenario 09 assesses the lawfulness of economic cyber espionage under international law. In addition, Scenario 05 considers the legal limits to the exercise of law enforcement by one State in response to malicious cyber operations from another.

Behind the scenes

The project is supported by the following five partner institutions: the Czech National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NÚKIB), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE), the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, and Wuhan University, China. The core of the project team consists of Dr Kubo Mačák (ICRC) – General Editor; Mr Tomáš Minárik (NÚKIB) – Managing Editor; and Ms Taťána Jančárková (CCD COE) – Scenario Editor. The pilot year of the project (2018/19) was supported through the UK ESRC IAA Project Co-Creation scheme. The individual scenarios and the Toolkit as such have been reviewed by a team of over 30 peer reviewers. The Toolkit was formally launched on 28 May 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia; its Chinese launch took place on 2 November 2019 in Wuhan, China; it received its first general annual update on 2 October 2020; and it remains continuously updated. For questions about the project including media enquiries, please contact us at cyberlaw@exeter.ac.uk.

Other resources

• FAQ – Frequently asked questions about the project and the Toolkit.
• All articles – Updated list of all substantive articles in the Toolkit. In a printed book, this would be the table of contents.
• Keywords – Overview of all keywords used across the Toolkit content. Serves the same purpose as an index would in a printed book.
• Examples – List of real-world incidents that have inspired the analysis in the Toolkit.
• Glossary – Glossary of the technical terms used in the Toolkit.
• Short form citation – Abbreviated references for the most commonly used citations in the Toolkit.
• Bibliography – Bibliography of resources used in the creation and development of the Toolkit.
• People – List of all people involved in the project (including scenario authors, peer reviewers, research assistants...).