Enlarge / Karim Khan speaks at Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace during the visit of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in Bogota, Colombia, on June 6, 2023. (credit: Long Visual Press/Getty )

For years, some cybersecurity defenders and advocates have called for a kind of Geneva Convention for cyberwar , new international laws that would create clear consequences for anyone hacking civilian critical infrastructure, like power grids, banks, and hospitals. Now the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague has made it clear that he intends to enforce those consequences—no new Geneva Convention required. Instead, he has explicitly stated for the first time that the Hague will investigate and prosecute any hacking crimes that violate existing international law, just as it does for war crimes committed in the physical world.

In a little-noticed article released last month in the quarterly publication Foreign Policy Analytics, the International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor, Karim Khan, spelled out that new commitment: His office will investigate cybercrimes that potentially violate the Rome Statute, the treaty that defines the court’s authority to prosecute illegal acts, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

“Cyberwarfare does not play out in the abstract. Rather, it can have a profound impact on people’s lives,” Khan writes. “Attempts to impact critical infrastructure such as medical facilities or control systems for power generation may result in immediate consequences for many, particularly the most vulnerable. Consequently, as part of its investigations, my Office will collect and review evidence of such conduct.”

Enlarge / St. Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Ireland has shut down most of the major IT systems running its national healthcare service, leaving doctors unable to access patient records and people unsure of whether they should show up for appointments, following a “very sophisticated” ransomware attack.

Paul Reid, chief executive of Ireland’s Health Service Executive, told a morning radio show that the decision to shut down the systems was a “precautionary” measure after a cyber attack that impacted national and local systems “involved in all of our core services.”

Some elements of the Irish health service remain operational, such as clinical systems and its Covid-19 vaccination program, which is powered by separate infrastructure. Covid tests already booked are also going ahead.

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A coordinated effort has captured the command-and-control servers of the Emotet botnet:

Emotet establishes a backdoor onto Windows computer systems via automated phishing emails that distribute Word documents compromised with malware . Subjects of emails and documents in Emotet campaigns are regularly altered to provide the best chance of luring victims into opening emails and installing malware ­ regular themes include invoices, shipping notices and information about COVID-19 .

Those behind the Emotet lease their army of infected machines out to other cyber criminals as a gateway for additional malware attacks, including remote access tools (RATs) and ransomware .

[…]

A week of action by law enforcement agencies around the world gained control of Emotet’s infrastructure of hundreds of servers around the world and disrupted it from the inside.

Machines infected by Emotet are now directed to infrastructure controlled by law enforcement, meaning cyber criminals can no longer exploit machines compromised and the malware can no longer spread to new targets, something which will cause significant disruption to cyber-criminal operations.

[…]

The Emotet takedown is the result of over two years of coordinated work by law enforcement operations around the world, including the Dutch National Police, Germany’s Federal Crime Police, France’s National Police, the Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, the UK’s National Crime Agency, and the National Police of Ukraine.

Insider data theft :

Dutch police have arrested two individuals on Friday for allegedly selling data from the Dutch health ministry’s COVID-19 systems on the criminal underground.

[…]

According to Verlaan, the two suspects worked in DDG call centers, where they had access to official Dutch government COVID-19 systems and databases.

They were working from home:

“Because people are working from home, they can easily take photos of their screens. This is one of the issues when your administrative staff is working from home,” Victor Gevers, Chair of the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure, told ZDNet in an interview today.

All of this remote call-center work brings with it additional risks.