Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

by Kim Zetter

Under the UN Charter’s Law of Armed Conflict, for example, they determined that hacking the control system of a dam to unleash water into a valley was the equivalent of breaching the dam with explosives. And launching an attack from a proxy system located in a neutral country would be prohibited in the same way that an army couldn’t march through a neutral country’s territory to invade an enemy. They also determined that an attack had to cause physical or personal damage to qualify as an act of force—simply erasing hard drives, if it didn’t result in physical damage or injury, didn’t qualify. But what about an attack on Wall Street that damaged a nation’s economy or aimed to do so? Here they found the legal waters less clear. Some of the experts believed such an attack qualified, while others were less convinced.