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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

The diplomatic solution would be to have a doctrine of cyber warfare drafted by the U.N. that explicitly states when a cyber warfare attack is an act of war. There would also have to be guidelines of evidence that a state was sponsoring or had knowledge of but failed to control these acts. Unless and until such a resolution is adopted there's very little we can do other than incorporate cyber warfare defense as a component of our overall national defense.

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- The US might not like these because then they can't send malware into Iran to disrupt their nuclear program.

- Tracing the 'real' source of an attack can be difficult. E.g. what if it's only being routed through China?

- This would only encourage a more 'locked down' Internet. Reducing the current open-ness of the Internet, and putting up strict national boundaries in order to make it easier to control/find attacks leaving your country so that they don't trigger a war.

Furthermore, would an American population really support -say- a nuclear attack on China because certain information was compromised, or because the lights went out in America for a few days ? A week ? Fat chance. Would such an attack stop the cyber attack ? Probably not. Disconnect from the internet ? Not an option for any trade-based nation, plus also unlikely to stop the cyber attacks.

First lesson in international law - there is no international law, because the actors involved are sovereign and only prolonged warfare can -sometimes- dislodge them, at massive cost. So open violations of international treaties, even on large scale, are let go without consequences. Say, for example, something between legal discrimination (at minimum denial of religious freedom, article 2 UNHR) and religious genocide is happening in most/all muslim countries (with countries like Morocco and Turkey "merely" discriminating and Sudan, Pakistan and Bangladesh regularly being accused of large-scale state-sponsored religious genocide). And it's not like most of those countries are even a real military threat.

For China the question may be simpler, of course. It is certainly, shall we say, "absorbing" a few of it's neighbors. Again, what are you going to do ?

Let's be honest, the US isn't really famous for only doing things sanctioned by the UN.

No military power is. Only countries like Liechtenstein.

From a strictly altruistic perspective that may sound great. From a realistic perspective the truth is a U.N. doctrine on cyber warfare would do nothing but make the various parties dig in deeper and work harder to cover their tracks. The world of CNO (CNE, CNA, CND) is nothing if not a step deeper into the shadow world that covert ops have lived in for decades. We are naive if we don't understand that all parties mentioned are involved in it from some perspective both Defensively and Offensively (the famous phrase holds true, often the best defensive strategy is a good offensive strategy).

Considering the US and China are both on the security council, nothing with teeth will ever come out of the UN. And if it did, no one would care because of how difficult it is to prove attribution.

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