The Need for Speed: Leveraging Civilian Contributions in a Rapidly Evolving Cyber Conflict

Cyberspace is an increasingly contested environment that includes new forms of inter- and intra-state conflict, such as industrial espionage, infrastructure hacking, disinformation, and election manipulation. Involvement in cyber operations is not limited to state or quasi-state actors but also includes civilians, thus challenging traditional ethical and legal frameworks such as the laws of war and armed conflict. Combining principles from bioethics and military ethics with empirical methodologies, a preliminary open-source ethical framework is presented to help guide civilian volunteer engagement in conflict zones. Drawing on empirical data from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the framework addresses the unique ethical challenges posed by civilian participation in cyber and hybrid warfare, spaces where identities, roles, and responsibilities can become blurred. The framework emphasizes adaptability, leveraging the concept of a “learning organization” (i.e., dynamic bottom-up and top-down co-development) to ensure that guidelines to orient civilians remain relevant amidst rapidly changing technological and geopolitical contexts. An open-source innovation approach is mobilized to foster a community-driven and continuously evolving structure that can be easily shared and adapted to diverse conflict environments, thereby enhancing resilience and responsiveness to the ethical complexities of decentralized civilian involvement. The aim is to provide civilians with structured yet flexible guidelines to safely navigate their various roles and responsibilities. The effectiveness of the framework will be analyzed using real-world case studies (e.g., drones, OSINT, hacktivism) from Ukraine, illustrating how civilian contributions could be ethically managed without compromising operational security or humanitarian protections. Policy recommendations are proposed to integrate and formalize the framework in an established organization, enabling a more robust, ethical approach to civilian cyber operations. A path forward is offered for policy-