Final hybrid workshop of the Cyber Attribution Project

On 27 March, a team of students from the Faculty of Law led by Dr. Evgeni Moyakine – Emma Brambilla, Emmy Zhang, Jakub Suchnicki, Janneke Douwes Dekker, Jessie Meij, Karolina Gruzel, Kyle Ludi and Lisa van der Tuin – concluded the ‘Cyber Attribution Project’ funded by the Groningen University Fund by holding a hybrid expert workshop at the beautiful Groningen Mennonite Church (“Doopsgezinde Kerk”). The event was organized in collaboration with the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI and hosted by the student-assistant Karolina Gruzel acting as a project officer.

During the workshop, Evgeni Moyakine as a lead researcher and students under his supervision shared their research results with a group of Dutch and foreign experts in the field of cyber operations and State responsibility. Among other things, they discussed what cyberattacks are carried out against the (Northern) Netherlands, how they can be attributed to States, which rules and procedures are followed at the national level for attribution purposes and what legal consequences this entails. The workshop started with a presentation by the lead researcher about the project as a whole and his findings detailed in the recently published article about state control theories. Then the students introduced four papers written by them and, similarly to their supervisor, engaged in a profound discussion with the experts providing valuable feedback. Evgeni Moyakine and Karolina Gruzel concluded the workshop by sharing the results of the empirical study about legal attribution in the cyber domain that was sent to the experts in this specific area.

The workshop was an interactive experience filled with a great deal of mutual learning, as emphasised by both the students and some experts who were present. Among those experts who attended the event in person and online from all over the world were not only academics and cyber specialists, but also representatives of the Dutch government. It has been a great pleasure and a powerful learning experience to cooperate with such inspiring people from different countries and organisations during the course of the research project and to be able to bring together Dutch and international students following various Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes at the Faculty of Law.

The team consisting of eight students and the Assistant Professor from our faculty is tremendously grateful to everybody who made this project possible and enriched the conducted research through his or her participation. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of an inclusive multi-stakeholder collaboration on the pressing issue of cyber attribution and international responsibility.

This article was published by the Faculty of Law.