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About the projectThe 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 13 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 |
Featured incident
In October 2019, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the US National Security Agency (NSA) issued a report on the activities of the hacker group Turla, suspected to be based in Russia. The report claimed that two malicious tools – previously identified as being used by Turla – were Iranian in origin. Allegedly, Turla was now using these tools independently to exploit them for its own intelligence aims. While the report acknowledged the difficulties of attributing cyber operations, it claimed that Turla had had access to Iranian tools and thus had most likely compromised Iran’s operational as well as command-and-control infrastructure. The tools have allegedly been used for espionage against foreign governments, most likely in the Middle East. Within the Toolkit, scenario 02 considers the legality of cyber espionage against government departments and scenario 07 considers the leak of State-developed hacking tools and their subsequent repurposing by malicious actors.
Behind the scenesThe project is supported by the following five partner institutions: the Czech National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NCISA), 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 (NCISA) – 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 20 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; and it remains continuously updated. For questions about the project including media enquiries, please contact us at cyberlaw@exeter.ac.uk.
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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...).