| Abstrakt: |
This article aims to analyze belligerent actions in cyberspace, particularly against critical infrastructures (CI) of a nation-state. Given the dual nature of CIs, this issue closely relates to the exercise of cyber capabilities and International Humanitarian Law. In the Section 2, we discuss key concepts as the thresholds for a cyber-attack to be considered an armed attack according to International Law. In Section 3, we address the most frequent targets for cyber conflicts based on historical analysis of over 1,300 documents. Among those, we identified eighty-seven (-6.5%) reports, grouped into seven campaigns between 2010 and 2019 that targeted CI with kinetic purposes or producing concrete effects. The low number of attacks demonstrates that cyber-attacks rarely scale up to this level. In the third section, we engage in a cross-comparison of the seven campaigns against CI attributed to state actors. Conversely, no nation-state officially claimed to have authored the actions. The comparison also demonstrated that attacks against CI are not frequent and require specialized knowledge to target industrial control systems. We conclude that as the number of countries with cyber offensive capabilities increases, we expect that attacks against CI also expand, and as a result, the risk of kinetic attack on CI becomes more likely. Thus, setting explicit cyber norms on the subject is a collective concern that countries share and should engage in a multilateral debate to address it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
