31. December 2020

Martin Dahinden, former Ambassador of Switzerland to the United States and Member of the ICT4Peace Foundation Board and Sara Pangrazzi, PhD candidate of the University of Zurich published on 30 December 2020 the following Op-ed in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ):

“Neutralität im Cyberraum: Die Schweiz ist gefordert” (Neutrality in Cyberspace – A challenge for Switzerland”. 

“Many countries have been massively upgrading their military IT capabilities for several years. Switzerland now also wants to create a Cyber Command. What does this mean for Switzerland and its neutrality ?

The importance of cyber attacks is increasing rapidly: For example, the prominent malicious program “WannaCry” has infected more than 200,000 computers worldwide within a short period of time since its discovery in May 2017 and made headlines around the world. Computers from the Russian Interior Ministry, numerous hospitals in Great Britain, the car manufacturers Renault and Nissan and Deutsche Bahn were affected. The program exploited a security hole in the Windows operating system, which is widely used around the world, and caused billions in damage.

The Swiss federal administration also had to deal with digital attacks on a regular basis: According to a media release, cyber attacks on the Swiss Federal Defense Department were discovered in September 2017 and in January 2016 they led to the theft of more than 20 gigabytes of data from the arms company RUAG. The technical tracing of the respective authors keep computer scientists busy to this day.”

In order to cope with these risks, states are upgrading their military IT capabilities. Switzerland is also expanding its digital capacities and is planning to set up a cyber command. Because there are still many ambiguities regarding the application of international standards to cyber-attacks, there are also considerable legal and political challenges in addition to the technical ones.”

This portion of the article has been translated with Google translate. The full article in German can be found here.