A/68/156
up the necessary understanding and trust among signatories and to ensure that they
can be reliably held to account for their adherence to their commitments. Experience
in concluding these agreements on other subjects shows that they can be meaningful
and effective only as the culmination of diplomatic attempts to develop shared
understandings and approaches, not as their starting point. The United Kingdom
believes that the efforts of the international community should be focused on
developing common understandings on international law and norms rather than
negotiating binding instruments that would only lead to the partial and premature
imposition of an approach to a domain that is currently too immature to support it.
Possible measures that could be taken by the international community to
strengthen information security at the global level
The borderless nature of cyberspace provides a particular imperative for States
to enhance bilateral, regional and multilateral cooperation to develop common
responses to common threats. In the view of the United Kingdom, the measures that
could make the most significant contribution at this stage are:
(a) Continuing discussions among States to develop a normative framework
of acceptable State behaviour based on existing principles of international law and
customary international norms;
(b) The development of confidence building measures for cyberspace aimed
at increasing the transparency and predictability of State behaviour, thus reducing
the risk of misperception or unintended escalation of incidents;
(c) The establishment of computer emergency response teams by States as a
focus for incident-handling and information-sharing, supplemented by notification
of key points of contact and reliable crisis communications mechanisms;
(d) The development of joint exercises to test joint incident-handling and
communications procedures;
(e)
The development of harmonized legal approaches to tackle cybercrime;
(f) Enhanced dialogue with business and civil society representatives to
ensure coordinated and prioritized approaches in a domain that is largely owned and
operated by the private sector;
(g) Commitments by States with more mature cybersecurity capabilities to
support capacity-building for other States.
13-39735
19