Paris breakthrough as 51 states agree to regulate cyber warfare
Fifty-one states yesterday pledged support for an agreement regulating cyber weapons and the use of cyber space, in talks at the Paris Peace Forum.
The Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyber Space is a breakthrough in drafting unified standards for emerging forms of cyber warfare after years of stalled negotiations.
“We need norms to avoid war in cyber space, which would be catastrophic,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.
China, Russia and the US did not sign the pledge, which includes commitments not to attack civilian buildings such as hospitals.
Yesterday’s agreement, on the second day of the three-day forum, comes the year after the WannaCry and NotPetya global ransomware attacks – the most serious examples yet of state-sponsored cyber warfare.
The WannaCry attack disabled more than 250,000 computers in more than 150 countries and led to more than 19,000 patient appointments being cancelled in the UK.
The NotPetya state-sponsored attack a month later affected a third of Ukraine’s computers and impaired international shipping and air delivery.
Microsoft president Brad Smith said in Paris on Sunday that nearly a billion people were victims of cyber attacks, mainly WannaCry and NotPetya, last year.
North Korea is believed to be behind the WannaCry attack, while Russia is considered by experts to be behind NotPetya.
The agreement seeks to set up a mechanism that will help to identify government-backed attacks and establish when a state is justified in retaliating.
Mr Smith backed the drive for an overhaul of the global legal framework governing cyber warfare and said the need for a new system was urgent.
The Paris Peace Forum, launched by French President Emmanuel Macron on the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, is intended to end the divisions that led to what was called “the war to end all wars”.
Mr Macron presented the text of the Paris peace call as he opened Unesco’s Internet Governance Forum in the French capital yesterday.
“Cyber space plays a capital role in all aspects of our life,” he said. “We reaffirm our support for an open cyber space, secure, stable, accessible and pacific, which has become an integral part of our economic, cultural and political life.”
Mr Macron said the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights should also be applied to cyber space.
“We recognise that the menace constituted by cyber crime forces us to double our efforts and to render our products more secure,” he said.
The newly adopted text, in which signatories pledge “to respect people’s rights and protect them online as they do in the physical world” was signed by 93 civil groups and 218 companies.
About 20,000 representatives from politics, economics, academia, media and civil society gathered to discuss and promote governance.
The Paris forum received close to 900 applications from 116 countries to pitch projects aimed at achieving joint solutions to problems in technology, security and the environment.
Technology was accorded a central role at the forum, which will also tackle issues linked to online radicalisation and artificial intelligence.
Officials and experts stressed the need for collaboration on the positive use of emerging technologies, rather than seeing innovation as a race to gain the upper hand.
“We need to develop the new tools in an open and collaborative way,” said Antoine Bordes, director of AI research science at Facebook.
Mr Bordes said his company sought to collaborate with governments and others.
Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, said that greater understanding of the true use of AI was needed to dismantle the idea of it as a tool of power.
“We need to show why this is not a race or shouldn’t be a race,” Mr Al Olama said. “The race is in developing AI but not in controlling it.”