Dear friend, October is our Cybersecurity Awareness Month. We have carefully curated various audio-visual resources to help you get a sense of cybersecurity issues in humanitarian settings.
For decades, there has been consensus in the international community that in times of armed conflict, impartial humanitarian operations and the humanitarian personnel involved therein must not be targeted. In other words, you do not shoot at the truck that delivers food and medicine to civilians. This consensus must be respected online as well as offline, as recently affirmed in aresolution entitled ‘Safeguarding Humanitarian Data’ adopted by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The backbone of this consensus is enshrined in international humanitarian law (IHL).
In this post, the ICRC’s Tilman Rodenhäuser, Balthasar Staehelin, and Massimo Marelli explore how these rules impose limits on digital threats against impartial humanitarian organizations and propose legal, policy and operational measures to safeguard them against such threats.
The Cyber Law Toolkit, the leading free online resource on international law and cyber operations, has just received its annual general update. Several new detailed scenarios inspired by real-world cyber incidents have been added to the Toolkit, including on cyber disruption of humanitarian assistance, contesting ongoing attacks through cyber means, or on extraterritorial incidental cyber harm.
The use of cyber operations during armed conflict has become a reality of armed conflicts and is likely to be more prominent in the future. This Review article analyzes pertinent humanitarian, legal and policy questions concerning cyber warfare. It emphasizes that cyber operations during armed conflicts, or cyber warfare, are regulated by IHL – just as is any weapon, means or methods of warfare used by a belligerent in a conflict, whether new or old.
Interactive experience: digital dilemmas
While digital technologies address challenges in humanitarian action, they also pose risks to the population if not used appropriately. How would you handle the Digital Dilemmas if you woke up to a humanitarian crisis? The website is now available in eight languages.