168 Cyberpower
The point is to determine whether the country that has been attacked has the
right to respond to an act of cyberwar, using either passive defences or active
cyberdefence measures against the ICT infrastructures of the other state. This
could include the right to use cyberattack countermeasures not only against
the state at the origin of the cyberattacks but also against all the intermediary
states that passively allowed, or contributed to, the attacks and neglected to
prevent, knowingly or not, the cyberattacks from within their national borders.
Sometimes active defence could be viewed as a form of reprisal and be used
as self-defence in anticipation of a real attack.
As yet there is no international treaty, convention, or protocol ...