International cybersecurity laws are hard to enforce primarily due to the principles of national sovereignty, the technical difficulty of attribution, the vast difference in speed between legal processes and cyberattacks, and the existence of political safe havens for criminals.
As of September 7, 2025, while the world is more digitally interconnected than ever, our legal and law enforcement systems remain largely bound by physical borders. This fundamental mismatch creates a challenging environment for enforcing laws against global cyber threats, a problem faced by law enforcement agencies in Pakistan and every other nation.
1. The Sovereignty Problem: Your Laws End at Your Border
This is the single biggest hurdle. International law is built on the principle of national sovereignty, meaning a country’s laws and the authority of its police apply only within its own borders.
- The Challenge: A cybercriminal in one country can launch an attack against a victim in Pakistan, routing their traffic through servers in a dozen other countries. The investigator in Rawalpindi cannot legally seize a server in Germany or compel an internet service provider in Brazil to hand over data. They must rely on the cooperation of the authorities in those countries, who have their own laws, priorities, and procedures.
- The Result: This creates a slow, complex, and often frustrating process of cross-border investigation that criminals are experts at exploiting.
2. The Attribution Problem: Who Fired the Digital Bullet?
Before you can enforce a law, you must be able to prove who broke it. In cyberspace, this process, known as attribution, is incredibly difficult.
- The Challenge: Hackers are masters of anonymity. They use a variety of technical tools—such as the Tor network, VPNs, and compromised proxy servers—to hide their true location and identity. For sophisticated state-sponsored attacks, the use of custom malware and advanced infrastructure makes definitive, public proof of the attacker’s identity nearly impossible.
- The Result: Even when a country is certain who is behind an attack, the evidence may not be strong enough to stand up in a court of law or to justify a strong diplomatic response. This creates a high degree of plausible deniability, which is a key feature of modern cyber warfare.
3. The Speed Problem: Law Moves Slower Than Light
The legal and diplomatic processes required for international cooperation move at a fundamentally different speed than the threats they are trying to combat.
- The Challenge: A cyberattack can unfold in a matter of minutes or hours. The formal process for requesting legal assistance from another country, through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), can take months or even years. By the time the requested evidence is received, it is often too old to be useful, and the criminals have long since covered their tracks and moved on.
- The Result: This speed mismatch means that for fast-moving criminal investigations, law enforcement must often rely on informal, police-to-police cooperation, which is not always possible.
4. The “Safe Haven” Problem
Some countries are either unwilling or unable to crack down on cybercriminals operating within their borders.
- The Challenge: A number of nations have become effective “safe havens” for cybercriminals. They may refuse to cooperate with international investigations, decline to extradite their own citizens, or even tacitly support criminal groups as long as those groups do not target their own country.
- The Result: This provides a secure base of operations from which criminal syndicates, such as major ransomware gangs, can launch attacks against the rest of the world with little fear of being brought to justice.