Cyber Warfare and International Law – An Overview on The Threats and Attacks that Targeting Qatar

This was my supervisors comments:

– I think the Introduction (or in a future Executive Summary) is missing the goals and the contributions of your project. You aim to review International Law, and in particular applying in the context of Qatar. But it is not clear in the end what you will be contributing: do you propose changes in these laws, are you predicting new developments, and how a small country can respond and be more resilient; do you want to draw from existing studies, and put them into context of Qatar (and draw new insights)? I mean, you will want to provide more than an overview of threats and attacks (as the title implies), but rather provide well-founded analysis, perhaps come upon with recommendations
– I suggest you create a separate section or chapter to discuss Qatar. You can give some background and context of the country, its initiatives to protect the country from cyber threats, and may give the example of hacking of the QNA as a case study. I note however caution on how you cite and quote references. For example, you have in page 8 “The Ministry of Interior on Qatar while working with a team of FBI officers from the U.s. discovered that the attacks that commenced in April 19, 2017 was organized well and the UAE government must have played a role in propagating the cyber warfare”, and cite Younes (an AlJazeera news item). I checked the item, but for example it does not cite the FBI (in the item). It quotes a Washington Post article which says that US intelligence officials learned that UAE officials discussed the hacking, etc. Attribution in cyber space is a complicated matter, so unless there is a public, official report with convincing arguments (which you can cite), I think in your dissertation you should explicitly state what come from news articles eg “it was reported in…”), but also have quotes from officials in quotation marks (not as a fact).
In the end, I think this episode can make a good case-study, but should be put separately in a subsection, and described as reported in your sources.
(There is also quite a bit of misinformation work going on now, which can also be used to as a case-study, though I believe you have even less information)

Thanks Comments from Customer Discipline: Cyber Warfare and Law