Cyberwar manual lays down rules for online attacks

A handbook due to be published later this week applies the venerable practice of international law to the world of electronic warfare in an effort to show how hospitals, civilians, and neutral nations can be protected in an information age fight. The Tallinn Manual — named for the Estonian capital where it was compiled — was created at the behest of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, a NATO think tank.

It takes existing rules on battlefield behavior — such as the 1949 Geneva Convention — to the Internet, occasionally in creative or unexpected ways. The manual's central premise is that war doesn't stop being war just because it happens online. Hacking a dam's controls to release its reservoir into a river valley can have the same effect as breaching it with explosives, its authors argue. Legally speaking, a cyberattack which sparks a fire at a military base is indistinguishable from an attack that uses an incendiary shell.