Law Commons^™

Introduction To The Symposium On Cyber Attribution, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium explores some of the legal issues surrounding the attribution of cyber conduct to states. Relative to states’ other activities, cyber conduct poses particularly thorny attribution challenges. States that engage in such conduct often use technology to obscure their identities or the full effects of their operations. The attribution challenges in turn raise difficult questions about how victim states should be allowed to respond — whether in kind, with other retorsions or countermeasures, with kinetic force, or by doing nothing at all. For example, how confident must a victim state be that it has correctly identified the source of …