Innovative weaponry always intrigues military planners whose task is to prognosticate what the battlefield of the future will look like. How to handle a new weapon and maximize its effect? Will it perhaps become a ‘game changer’? As a rule, debates of this nature—confined as they are to eventual (hence, hypothetical) armed conflicts—tend to take place in-house, certainly away from the limelight. The public at large is not necessarily aware of them. But, even if it is, the typical posture is to regard such deliberations as moot (until the floodgates of an armed conflict actually open). Still, every once in a long while, a new weapon arrives upon the scene attracting exceptional lay interest. Once engaged, the public is loath to leave the matter entirely in the hands of military professionals. The civil society— in the broadest sense of the term—deems itself fully entitled to enquire, express views, offer guidance and lay down the law. There are a handful of historical illustrations for public fascination with select novel weapons. None is comparable to the profound present allure of cyber weapons. Conceivably, the reason why so many people are so enthusiastically engrossed in cyber is that nowadays almost everybody (from an astonishingly early age and in every quarter of the world) has access to the internet and to the social media. Millions of people have suffered from or heard first-hand about phenomena such as ‘hacking’, ‘phishing’, or the malicious implant of a computer virus. The resultant trauma for the victim of a (peacetime) cyber attack makes him or her feel qualified to draw lessons and arrive at far-reaching conclusions (germane even in wartime). When the average person seems to grasp the nature of the topic, to be aware of what the stakes are, and to be in a position to offer a valid opinion, pressures on international lawyers to join the fray begin to mount. International lawyers are expected by public opinion—indeed, morally compelled—to investigate the repercussions of the use of the new weapon and to speculate about the resolution of problems that are anticipated. This, of course, is not what international lawyers ordinarily do in the sphere of armed conflicts. Generally speaking, lawyers do not speculate: they react to needs that have already become manifest in the world of reality. The international law of war, either at the preliminary stage of dissection or in the final phase of consolidation, usually comes in the wake—and not in advance—of the facts.