For years, some cybersecurity defenders and advocates have known as for a kind of Geneva Convention for cyberwar, new worldwide legal guidelines that will create clear penalties for anybody hacking civilian vital infrastructure like energy grids, banks and hospitals. Now the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on the Hague has made clear that he intends to implement these penalties—no new Geneva Convention required. Instead, he is explicitly acknowledged for the primary time that the Hague will examine and prosecute any hacking crimes that violate present worldwide legislation, simply because it does for battle crimes dedicated within the bodily world.

In a little-noticed article launched final month within the quarterly publication Foreign Policy Analytics, the International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor, Karim Khan, spelled out that new dedication: His workplace will examine cybercrimes that probably violate the Rome Statute, the treaty that defines the court docket’s authority to prosecute unlawful acts together with battle crimes, crimes in opposition to humanity, and genocide.

“Cyber warfare does not play out in the abstract. Rather, it can have a profound impact on people’s lives,” Khan writes. “Attempts to impact critical infrastructure such as medical facilities or control systems for power generation may result in immediate consequences for many, particularly the most vulnerable. Consequently, as part of its investigations, my Office will collect and review evidence of such conduct.”

When WIRED reached out to the International Criminal Court, a spokesperson for the workplace of the prosecutor confirmed that that is, the truth is, now the workplace’s official stance. “The Office considers that, in appropriate circumstances, conduct in cyberspace may potentially amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and/or the crime of aggression,” the spokesperson writes, “and that such conduct may potentially be prosecuted before the Court where the case is sufficiently grave.”

Neither Khan’s article nor his workplace’s assertion to WIRED mentions Russia or Ukraine. But the brand new assertion of the ICC prosecutor’s intent to research and prosecute hacking crimes comes within the midst of rising worldwide give attention to Russia’s cyberattacks focusing on Ukraine each earlier than and after its full-blown invasion of its neighbor in early 2022. In March of final yr, the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley’s School of Law despatched a proper request to the ICC prosecutor’s workplace urging it to consider war crime prosecutions of Russian hackers for their cyberattacks in Ukraine—even because the prosecutors continued to collect proof of extra conventional, bodily battle crimes that Russia has carried out in its invasion.

In the Berkeley Human Rights Center’s request, formally referred to as an Article 15 doc, the Human Rights Center targeted on cyberattacks carried out by a Russian group referred to as Sandworm, a unit inside Russia’s GRU navy intelligence company. Since 2014, the GRU and Sandworm specifically have carried out a sequence of cyberwar attacks against civilian critical infrastructure in Ukraine beyond anything seen in the history of the internet. Their brazen hacking has ranged from focusing on Ukrainian electrical utilities, triggering the only two blackouts ever caused by cyberattacks, to the discharge of the data-destroying NotPetya malware that unfold from Ukraine to the remainder of the world and inflicted greater than $10 billion in harm, together with to hospital networks in each Ukraine and the United States.