Tag Archive for: cross

Red Cross aims to make civilian wartime hacking more humanitarian


The role of civilian hackers during warfare continues to expand, and now at least one group is trying to set up some rules of engagement.

But whether the proposal from the International Committee of the Red Cross announced Wednesday will gain any traction and make these attempts more humane is anyone’s guess.

Civilian hackers have participated for a long time in various wartime conflicts, as documented by this article today in the Washington Post. For example, hackers targeted Western pro-Syrian supporters back in 2013, and Greek hackers in 2020 targeted numerous Azerbaijani government websites in support of Armenia.

Back in 2010, Richard Clarke in his book “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It,” only envisioned the scenario where state-sponsored cyberattacks occurred. That seems almost quaint by today’s actions that have expanded into civilian participation.

Another analysis in Lawfare by Kubo Macak, a legal adviser to the Red Cross, cited government-run cyber operations that date back decades. He cites repurposing civilian smartphone apps for military use, such as reporting on enemy troop movements for weapons targeting.

What’s different today is that the Russian/Ukraine war has erased numerous boundaries between civilians and the military. This happened through attacks by both governments on civilian targets and by both governments recruiting civilian hackers to participate in various cyber offensive operations. One analysis written back in 2022 found that despite the initial foray of Russian cyberattacks, they have had minimal impact on Ukraine.

A good illustration of this blurred line is how essential Starlink’s internet access has been for the Ukrainian government’s military operations – a civilian technology that has direct military application.

“The digitalization of societies has fundamentally shifted the role of civilian involvement in conflicts in both quality and quantity,” Macak says. Civilians now have a “direct contribution to the operations on the digital battlefield as support to kinetic operations.”

In their paper, the Red Cross advisers Tilman Rodenhäuser and Mauro Vignati point out it…

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A Digital Red Cross: What Would It Defend Against?


On November 18, 1991, after enduring a three-month artillery assault, the city of Vukovar in Croatia fell to what was then known as the federal Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Serb paramilitary forces. After JNA units took control of a hospital where hundreds of sick and wounded were located, they removed approximately 300 men of whom at least 200 were later murdered at the nearby town of Ovcara. Years later, the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia charged those responsible for this atrocity with war crimes.

For over 150 years, the Red Cross, Red Crescent, and later the Red Crystal symbol have endured as indelible images of protection during warfare. We reserve these emblems for people and places that are entitled to a rare privilege of safety and security while providing medical and humanitarian assistance during armed conflicts. The urge to expand their protection to other realms is understandable but requires caution and attention to technical, political, and operational challenges.

A Digital Protected Emblem

Recently, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced an innovative proposal to identify the digital presence of certain humanitarian and healthcare organizations during armed conflict. The hope is that identifying protected digital infrastructure “would make it easier for those conducting cyber operations during armed conflict to identify and spare protected facilities – just as a red cross or crescent on a hospital roof does in the real world.”

The proposal is a creative attempt to protect the digital presence of those humanitarian organizations entitled to the protections afforded by the Red Cross. The digital health of those organizations is essential to their ability to provide services, such as life-saving medical care. Malicious cyberattacks could, among other things, potentially deprive a facility of critical medical information that is necessary to treat patients. The Digital Red Cross proposal represents an attempt to bridge the gap between how International Humanitarian Law (IHL) applies in the physical world with the unique dimensions of the cyber domain. But if a Digital Red Cross system is…

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A.J. Petrovsky inks with Fairmont State cross country team | News, Sports, Jobs


Wirt County’s A.J. Petrovsky runs in the 2021 Class A cross country regionals. (Photo by Jay W. Bennett)