Clarifying the international debate on stuxnet: Arguments for stuxnet as an act of war

Abstract

Discovery of the Stuxnet computer worm has brought to the fore ongoing discussions concerning the classification of cyber attacks as acts of war. In the aftermath of its detection, experts and media personnel alike were quick in putting the implicative tag 'act of war' onto the use of the malicious program, although no competent justification for such labelling was offered. The following chapter aims to clarify the international debate by presenting definitional criteria for an act of war in cyberspace and applying it to the empirical case of Stuxnet.