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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 core, it presently consists of 25 hypothetical scenarios. 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; by browsing through the national positions on international law in cyberspace; 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	S20 Medical facilities
S21 Misattribution	S22 Methods of warfare	S23 Vaccine research	S24 Internet blockage
S25 Humanitarian assistance

Featured incident

On 14 May 2021, a ransomware attack targeted the Irish national healthcare service on both national and local levels, including several hospitals that had to cancel planned procedures. The day before, National Cyber Security Centre informed about a potential threat inside the Department of Health network, which spoiled the efforts of ransomware infiltration. The Department’s IT systems were preemptively shut down. The criminal investigation is focusing on the Wizard Spider gang that is operating from Saint Petersburg in Russia according to intelligence agencies. The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ireland Simon Coveney said he has spoken to his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, about the cyber attack. Although most of the systems were operable a month later, its complete recovery may take up to 6 months.

In the Toolkit, Scenario 14 explores the legal questions regarding ransomware extortion campaigns. Given the indirect involvement of a State, Scenario 06 deals with the possible countermeasures deployed against an enabling State. Scenario 20 focuses on cyber operations against medical facilities.

Quick links

• 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.
• Legal concepts – Overview of all legal concepts from different branches of international law used across the Toolkit content.
• Examples – List of real-world incidents that have inspired the analysis in the Toolkit.
• National positions (NEW!) – List of publicly available national positions on the application of international law to cyber operations.
• 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...).

Behind the scenes

The project is supported by the following six 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 (CCDCOE), the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, the U.S. Naval War College, United States, 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 (CCDCOE) – Scenario Editor. 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 most recent general annual update on 22 September 2021; and it remains continuously updated. For questions about the project including media enquiries, please contact us at cyberlaw@exeter.ac.uk.

On 29 January 2020, The New Humanitarian reported that dozens of servers were “compromised” at the United Nations offices in Geneva and Vienna. The attack dated back to July 2019 and affected staff records, health insurance, and commercial contract data. According to an unnamed UN official cited in an Associated Press report on the same day, the level of sophistication was so high that it was possible a State-backed actor might have been behind it. Within the Toolkit, Scenario 04 specifically considers a hypothetical situation in which an international organization falls victim to cyber attacks, the impact of which could and should have been averted by the host State.

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On 30 July 2020, the Council of the European Union decided to impose restrictive measures against six individuals and three entities considered to be responsible for or involved in various hostile cyber operations. These included the attempted hack of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the WannaCry and NotPetya incidents. The sanctions imposed included a travel ban and an asset freeze. In addition, EU persons and entities were prohibited from making funds available to those listed. This was the first time the EU has imposed restrictive measures of this kind. Within the Toolkit, Scenario 04 specifically considers a hypothetical situation in which an international organization falls victim to cyber attacks, and Scenario 17 discusses the legality of targeted restrictive measures of this kind from the perspective of international law.

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On 13 March 2020, Brno University Hospital, the second-largest hospital in the Czech Republic, at the time also providing COVID-19 testing capacities, was targeted by ransomware. The hospital was forced to shut down its entire IT network, postpone urgent surgical interventions, and reroute patients to other nearby hospitals. It took several weeks before the hospital was fully operational again. Scenario 14 in the Toolkit provides the legal analysis of a ransomware campaign against municipal and health care services abroad; Scenario 20 and Scenario 23 both focus on various cyber operations against hospitals.

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The first sign of an malicious cyber activity targeting the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa was spotted in January 2020. The suspected actor is the "Bronze President", a hacker group allegedly residing in China. The perpetrators obtained data from the headquarters’ IT system. The data was only transmitted during work hours, which concealed it in the regular data stream. China distanced itself from the activity claiming the incident was supposed to damage Sino-African relations.

In the context of the incident, the main issue is the responsibility of the host State for providing the security of the international organisation, which is developed in Scenario 04.

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