Cyber attack

In February 2018, the German government’s network was attacked. Germany did not specify what kind of information was accessed by the foreign hackers, but it is publicly known that the hackers successfully attacked the IT system of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In light of Michael Sulmeyer’s excellent recent piece on splitting NSA and CYBERCOM, which ran at War on the Rocks last week, I want to pull together some of the key legal and policy developments of the past year in a single narrative. My aim is to put them in context with each other in a way that will provide useful background for those new to this issue, while also putting a spotlight on the deconfliction-of-equities issue that the split proposal raises.

In my first post on this subject, I quoted a news story in fedscoop saying that

The development of “loud” offensive cyber tools, [that could be definitively traced to the United States and thus] able to possibly deter future intrusions, represent a “different paradigm shift” from what the agency has used to in the past.

NATO recently announced that it will regard cyber as a domain of conflict, joining land, sea, and air as other domains in which conflict may occur. At a press conference on June 14, 2016, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that NATO “will recognize cyberspace as an operational domain, just like air, sea and land. Cyber defence is part of collective defence.