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| Cyber |
| Blurring the lines: when does a civilian hacker become a combatant? |
| 2026-07-09 |
| [SWI] For centuries, civilians have been part of hostilities during wars. For example, during the Second World War, British volunteers phoned in early warning of air raids. Today, these actors are primarily hackers. Civilian hackers have increasingly been or are active in armed conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, as well as between Israel and Iran and between Israel and Hamas. In a modern battlefield, anyone with a smartphone is a potential source of military information that can collect and send data in seconds. With strategies that aim to mobilise “the whole of society” to defend a country, civilian involvement in warfare could become increasingly direct and far-reaching, warn the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights in a joint report. This raises many questions and creates its own set of problems. Not only are civilians exposing themselves to danger, but their involvement in conflicts raises the question of whether they classify as combatants or non-combatants under international humanitarian law – and benefit from protection. The more civilians actively participate in hostilities, the more the line between civilians and combatants becomes blurred, says the ICRC. “In several of today’s armed conflicts, the ICRC has documented cases in which civilians were shot or detained because they were suspected of using their mobile phones to spy for parties to the conflict,” Tilmann Rodenhäuser, a legal adviser at the ICRC and co-author of the report, told Swissinfo. One example where civilian hackers are most active is in Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia in February 2022. The war in Ukraine has transformed civilian participation. They’ve shifted from being isolated informants to networked, real-time intelligence contributors. In March 2022, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation introduced the chatbot eVorog (“e-Enemy”), allowing civilians to report troop movements, the location of unexploded ordnance, or the transport of materiel by Russian forces. Some groups of civilian hacktivists use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) operations to weaken their opponents. In such attacks, perpetrators attempt to overwhelm a website with traffic to prevent its normal operation. A well-known example is the civilian group IT Army of Ukraine, which was created and encouraged by the Ukrainian government to attack Russian targets. According to its own statements, the IT Army aims to help Ukraine win by “paralysing the aggressor’s economy and blocking key financial, infrastructure, and government services.” |
| Posted by:Skidmark |