The international community is too often focused on responding to the latest cyber attack instead of addressing the reality of pervasive and persistent cyber conflict. From ransomware against the city government of Baltimore to state-sponsored campaigns targeting electrical grids in Ukraine and the United States, we seem to have relatively little bandwidth left over to ask what we can hope for in terms of “peace” on the Internet, and how to get there. It’s also important to identify the long-term implications for such pervasive cyber insecurity across the public and private sectors, and how they can be curtailed. This edited volume analyzes the history and evolution of cyber peace and reviews recent international efforts aimed at promoting it, providing recommendations for students, practitioners, and policymakers seeking an understanding of the complexity of international law and international relations involved in cyber peace. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter analyses the main circumstances in which a cyber operation may constitute an internationally wrongful act. The first observation made, which is developed in the first section, is that there is no general prohibition of cyber operations in international law. Cyber operations between States are not per se prohibited by international law and generally constitute unfriendly or hostile acts. Despite the absence of a general prohibition on cyber operations, the carrying out of a cyber operation may lead to a violation of specific norms of international law. This chapter focuses on the primary norms of international law that can be breached by state-sponsored cyber operations, namely State sovereignty, non-intervention and human rights.