Chatham House Report: The Application of International Law to State Cyber attacks – Sovereignty and Non-Intervention
Hostile cyber operations by one state against another state are increasingly common. It is estimated
that over 22 states are responsible for sponsoring cyber operations that target other states, and the
number and scale of these operations is growing. Cyber operations that cause injury or death to persons
or damage or destruction of objects could amount to a use of force or armed attack under the UN Charter
(although the threshold for what constitutes a use of force is itself an area of controversy).
But in practice, the vast majority of cyber operations by states take place below the threshold of use of force,
instead consisting of persistent, low-level intrusions that cause harm in the victim state but often without
discernible physical effects.
To take just a few public examples, the NotPetya attack, an indiscriminate malware attack on
companies and governments Europe-wide, was attributed to Russia by a number of states in February
2018. A global hacking campaign targeting universities was attributed to Iran by the US and UK
in March 2018. An attack aimed at compromising specific routers to support espionage and theft of
intellectual property (IP) was jointly attributed to Russia by the US and UK in April 2018. In December 2018, the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance attributed the activities of a Chinese cyber espionage group targeting IP and sensitive commercial property to China’s Ministry of State Security. China has also been targeted; the country stated that, in 2017, it suffered nearly $60 billion in economic loss due to cybersecurity incidents, with 93.5 percent of ransomware attacks in China conducted from overseas. In October 2019, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre revealed that the UK has been on the receiving end of almost 1,800 cyberattacks in the preceding three years (i.e. at least 10 a week), most carried out by state-sponsored hackers.
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