E-Business
In Absence of Rules, Cyber Terrorists Attack Nations
The systematic crash of the computer systems of banks and TV broadcasters in South Korea — reportedly the result of an attack that was widely speculated to have been launched by North Korea — raises questions about what international laws, if any, govern the new and unexplored area of cyberwarfare.
“The answer is there’s nothing and there’s everything,” said Michael Schmitt, professor and chairman of the international law department at the U.S. Naval War College.
Schmitt, who was asked by the NATO Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence to look into these issues, chaired a three-year project that brought together 20 academics and practitioners from around the world.
CBC, the leading Canadian media reported that the culmination of their efforts was the recently published Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare.
“If you’re looking for cyber specific law, a law that says ‘a cyberattack that causes these consequences in an armed attack to which you can respond,’ you will find nothing,” he said. “But it was our unanimous consensus among the group of experts that the existing international law applies to cyberspace and to cyberweapons.”
This means that, as international law permits a country to defend itself and retaliate if attacked by conventional weapons, a country that is the victim of a cyberattack that causes damage or death, may also retaliate, either through cyberwarfare or conventional weapons.
“Hack into a control system of a dam and release waters downstream. Those waters are going to cause significant damage, physical damage, people will drown. In my mind that’s clearly an armed attack,” Schmitt said.
“And if someone did that to Canada, you could resort to force, not only cyber but armed force to defend yourself.”
Other examples of cyberwarfare that are grounds for retaliation by force could include hacking into a water treatment plant and causing chemicals to flow into the water, thereby poisoning the population, hacking into air traffic control systems and causing planes to crash, or hacking into a hospital and changing people’s blood type, causing harm to patients
But the attack on South Korea, if in fact North Korea was responsible, is different, Schmitt said.
The attack is certainly a violation of South Korea’s sovereignty and a violation of international law, he said, but not grounds for the use of force in response.
“We would call that a below the threshold operation that certainly would permit a response from South Korea but the response could not include armed force,” Schmitt said.
The retaliatory options for South Korea would include countermeasures. These are actions that can be taken by the aggrieved state that would normally be unlawful under international law but are considered acceptable because the aggressor state violated international law first.
“If state A attacks state B’s banking system, state B may then respond proportionally against state A’s banking system to compel state A to knock it off,” Schmitt said.
His group also looked at issues surrounding cyberattacks on civilians. Under international law and the principle of distinction, when on the battlefield, operations may only be directed against military objects and combatants and not civilians.
“We asked the question ‘when is a cyber operation a forbidden attack?’ There are all sorts of things you can do in cyberspace against civilians during an armed conflict that doesn’t physically harm them and doesn’t injure them,” he said. For example, erasing personal data or messing with their banking records.
“What we said is that this is a very hard question. Not unanimous, but the majority said that an attack, in the law of war, means you physically harm someone, you break something, you cause physical damage or you interfere in the functionality of an object such that it needs to be actually repaired.”
Ashley Deeks, an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and an expert in international law, said many of the scenarios are case by case.
“Even in the kinetic world, there is no real definition of what an armed attack is,” she said, adding that states look to past practices.
For example, the Stuxnet computer virus, reportedly launched by the U.S. that attacked and destroyed hundreds of centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Iran, raised these issues.
“I guess I would just characterize it as the closest thing we’ve seen to a cyber action that produces real world effects, not dissimilar from what a kinetic attack would do. But I’m not prepared to say it was an armed attack.”
That’s why a lot of people are starting to devote a lot of attention to cyberwarfare and trying to sort out where the lines are, Deeks said.
“There are a lot of question marks. If you took out a banking system, and it caused massive instability in the country … that could be construed as an armed attack by some states. But it’s really an open question,” she said.
“There would be other states that say, ‘No, unless people die, things blow up, not an armed attack. We want to set a high threshold.’ Others say, ‘That ‘s crazy. You want to start deterring these things. You want to call lower level things armed attacks.”
However, Schmitt said he believes all these thresholds will evolve over the next decade.
“I anticipate that we’ll see a lot of thresholds coming down that will allow states to respond more vibrantly to cyber attacks that might not be possible under the law as we found it.”
According to Kaspersky telemetry, almost 19,500 malicious packages were found in open-source projects by the end of 2025, representing a 37% increase compared to the end of 2024.
Modern software development is inseparable from open-source components. However, open-source software may contain intentionally hidden threats which can leave the products that use malicious packages vulnerable to manipulation, including supply chain attacks. According to a new Kaspersky global study, supply chain attacks have emerged as the most common cyberthreat facing businesses over the past year.
Kaspersky reminds about high‑profile supply chain attacks that have emerged recently: In April 2026, the official website for CPU-Z and HWMonitor, free tools used by hardware enthusiasts, IT administrators and system builders worldwide to monitor hardware performance was compromised, silently replacing legitimate software downloads with malware-laced installers.
Analysis from Kaspersky GReAT showed that the compromise window was approximately 19 hours. Kaspersky telemetry detected that more than 150 victims across multiple countries faced this attack. The majority were individual users, which is consistent with the consumer-facing nature of the compromised software. Affected organisations spanned retail, manufacturing, consulting, telecommunications and agriculture.
- In March 2026, Axios, one of the most widely used JavaScript HTTP clients, was compromised. The attackers hijacked a maintainer’s account and published poisoned versions of the package (1.14.1 and 0.30.4). The malicious releases contained no harmful code in Axios itself but introduced a phantom dependency that deployed a cross-platform RAT, contacted a C&C server, and then erased traces of itself for macOS, Windows and Linux. Both versions were removed within hours, and the dependency was quickly put under a security hold. Kaspersky GReAT confirmed that the attack was not standalone – it shared tactics, techniques and procedures with Bluenoroff’s GhostCall and GhostHire campaigns, presented at the Security Analyst Summit in 2025.
- In February 2026, the developers of Notepad++, a widely used open-source text and code editor, disclosed that their infrastructure had been compromised due to a hosting provider incident. Kaspersky GReAT researchers discovered that attackers behind the Notepad++ supply chain compromise had used at least three distinct infection chains and targeted a government organisation in the Philippines, a financial institution in El Salvador, an IT service provider in Vietnam and individuals across several countries.
“According to our survey, 31% of enterprise businesses have been impacted by a supply chain attack in the past 12 months. Nevertheless, the security level of open‑source projects is not necessarily lower than that of proprietary-vendor solutions. In some cases, an active open‑source community can quickly discover and remediate vulnerabilities, whereas proprietary systems often rely on internal teams for audits.
The open‑source community strives to monitor emerging risks, cybersecurity specialists conduct researches to find vulnerabilities and malicious code in open‑source software, promptly notifying their users and the community. Completely eliminating the potential risks is impossible, but they can be minimised also with the help of security solutions and automated code‑analysis tools,” comments Dmitry Galov, Head of Kaspersky GReAT Russia and CIS.
Data Knowledge and Information Privacy Protection Initiative (DKIPPI) has warned that widespread ignorance of data privacy practices is exposing Nigeria to serious national security and economic risks amid a rise in ransomware attacks.
Tokunbo Smith, president of DKIPPI, warned on Tuesday in Lagos, that the increasing frequency of ransomware incidents underscores the dangers of weak data protection systems across organisations and institutions.
He described ransomware attacks as a growing threat in which hackers infiltrate systems, demand payments and threaten to leak sensitive data.
Mr Smith said, “The cost of ignorance in data privacy is not just what you lose. It is what you expose. Data privacy has evolved beyond a technical concern to a critical governance and national development issue requiring urgent attention. Ransomware is no longer just cybercrime; it is economic warfare and a governance issue.”
Mr Smith urged both public and private sector leaders to adopt proactive and comprehensive data protection frameworks to safeguard sensitive information and strengthen institutional resilience.
He also called on government at all levels to go beyond punitive responses and implement stronger regulations, enforcement mechanisms, and national cyber resilience strategies.
According to him, DKIPPI will soon release a policy advocacy paper outlining the key risks associated with poor data protection practices.
He said the paper would highlight financial losses, institutional inefficiencies, and threats to national security, while recommending urgent reforms to procurement processes, compliance systems, and governance structures.
Mr Smith added that addressing data privacy gaps was critical to protecting Nigeria’s digital economy and restoring trust in its institutions.
Decision to cancel the $32.8 million fine previously imposed on Meta for alleged data privacy violations was taken as far back as October 30, 2025.
The development has raised concerns over the country’s approach to data protection enforcement and regulatory transparency.
This followed a confidential, out-of-court settlement singed by Nigerian Data Protection Commission (NDPC) with Meta, effectively waiving the fine imposed earlier that year.
This deal, sanctioned by a Federal High Court, resolved disputes over behavioural advertising and user data transfers without Meta paying the penalty.
Recall that the NDPC claimed that it launched investigation in September 2023 that examined Meta’s handling of personal data from more than 60 million Nigerian users.
The NDPC had accused Meta of several breaches, including the absence of explicit consent for behavioural advertising, unauthorised cross-border data transfers, the collection of data from non-users, and the deployment of algorithms that could expose users to financial and health risks.
At the time, the regulator described the penalty as part of efforts to strengthen digital rights protections in Africa’s most populous country, aligning Nigeria with global enforcement trends in the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, where Meta and other major technology firms have faced multibillion-dollar fines for similar violations.
However, documents from a subsequent settlement indicate that Nigeria reversed its position in October 2025.
Under the agreement, Meta was absolved of the $32.8 million penalty and required only to cover legal fees incurred by the government during court proceedings challenging the NDPC’s final orders.
The settlement was signed on 30 October 2025 and later validated by the Federal High Court in Abuja on 3 November 2025.
Despite this judicial confirmation, the terms of the agreement were not made public at the time, and only recently emerged through disclosed documentation.
The development has triggered questions about transparency in regulatory enforcement, particularly given the scale of the initial allegations and the number of affected users.
Iliya-Ezekiel Ndatse, data protection lawyer, said the outcome weakens regulatory deterrence.
“Removing penalties after such findings reduces the effectiveness of enforcement actions and weakens the credibility of compliance obligations,” he noted.
The case has also drawn comparisons with Nigeria’s previous dispute involving Twitter, now rebranded as X, which was banned in 2021 before the two parties reached a negotiated resolution.
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