> It's a war crime to attack hospitals
Bombing an hospital is a war crime. Letting some malware find it's way into misconfigured Microsoft computers is not.
Bombing an hospital is a war crime. Letting some malware find it's way into misconfigured Microsoft computers is not.
I believe it is. And if a nation were found to be attacking or knowingly permitting the attack of American hospitals in the midst of a pandemic, a physical strike against their military assets (though not personnel) would be proportional.
But this has to be made clear ex ante, which it hasn’t been.
What if that other country has nuclear weapons? Would WWIII start with cyber attacks first?
But apparently they know that people are hesitant in retaliating
As I have said before, paying ransoms and not retaliating is a good way to keep being attacked and asked for even more ransoms
This is a solved problem. Nuclear powers routinely skirmish, usually through proxies.
Other non-violent but serious responses include closing consulates, enacting sanctions and increasing military deployments close to the enemy’s border.
If the Iranians were behind a cyberattack on hospitals, they may or may not bet a bombing run.
But if the Russians were behind it, there's not telling what would happen.
Probably sanctions and maybe even specific sanctions against specific individuals.
There's not that clear balance between "the door was locked and I broke in" and "you were not even trying to secure this", and I would bet that most of these hospitals tilt to the later (MUMPS comes to mind), up to the point you can cause great havoc just by accident. So I would definitely argue against any absolute "everything is a malware attack" classification.
At the very least country doing this should be isolated.
Especially more recently, ransomware gangs have been deliberately targeting specific organizations. It's not necessarily just a matter of malware spreading rampantly and it happening to land on a hospital system before encrypting all their shares automatically.
I'm sure that still occurs, but a lot of them are now picking organizations ahead of time and doing more sophisticated, hand-tailored things to try to get in and encrypt as many files across the network as possible, then explicitly setting and negotiating a hefty ransom based on what they think the organization is able to pay.