The Cyber Law Toolkit, a leading interactive web-based resource for legal professionals working on international law and cyber operations, has expanded by adding new scenarios that provide independent legal analysis of novel questions raised by the hostile uses of information and communications technologies.
CCDCOE introduced the annual general update of the Cyber Law Toolkit on Friday, at its signature course on international law of cyber operations. The Toolkit consists of a growing number of hypothetical scenarios, each of which contains a description of fictitious cyber incidents inspired by real-world examples and accompanied by detailed legal analysis.
This week, five newly developed scenarios were added to the Toolkit, bringing the total number to 19. The new scenarios, for example, explore the constraints that international law places on co-ordinated responses to hostile cyber operations (collective countermeasures), analyse the lawfulness of various forms of cyber deception during armed conflict, and consider whether stoking of racial and religious hatred online may violate international law.
The project team has simultaneously issued a call for submissions for new scenarios to be included in the next general update in September 2021. This call for submissions is open until 15 November 2020. Full text of the call with more details is available for download here.
To keep pace with the recent developments in the cyber security domain and remain a relevant source for practitioners and scholars alike, the Toolkit is updated regularly on the basis of internal research and through external submissions. Besides the scenarios, the Toolkit website also contains overview tables for leading publicly known cyber incidents (e.g. WannaCry or NotPetya) that have served as inspiration for some of the analysis and it offers the possibility to search its nearly 300 pages by keywords such as attribution, self-defence, or weapons review.
The project is currently supported by the following partner institutions: Czech National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NÚKIB); International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE); University of Exeter; and Wuhan University.