The borderless and increasingly sophisticated nature of cyber crime calls for effective and timely responses from numerous stakeholders worldwide – including law enforcement agencies, international organisations, Computer Emergency Response Teams and Internet Service Providers. Therefore, the role of international criminal cooperation in the context of cyber incidents is becoming increasingly crucial.
Cyberspace has challenged the fundamental principle of territorial jurisdiction and thus emphasises even more the burden on successful cross-border cooperation. Above and beyond the technical concerns of poor attacker attribution and the difficulties of acquiring digital evidence, some of the primary international legal obstacles include the lack of requisite procedural rules, determining jurisdiction and finding effective means of communication.
Moreover, a cyber incident is not always recognised as a crime by both the victim nation and by the nation from which the attack originated. It is therefore clear that a thorough review of substantial and procedural law should be undergone on the national level before international cooperation could be effective, or even possible.
This paper focuses on offences against data, property and infrastructure and draws attention to the most relevant international instruments employed in prosecuting cyber crime. According to the firm belief of legal experts working in the area, awareness about such international instruments as well as guidance toward proper implementation are immediately required. Hence, this paper offers a brief introduction to the main challenges of judicial cooperation in the field of cyber crime and, looking toward the future, describes important trends in the domain of international criminal cooperation.
Published in: Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Information Warfare and Security ECIW-2011, The Institute of Cybernetics at the Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia 7-8 July 2011.
Talihärm, A.-M. (2011) International Criminal Cooperation in the Context of Cyber Incidents. In: Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Information Warfare and Security ECIW-2011, The Institute of Cybernetics at the Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia 7-8 July 2011.