Cybersecurity In-Depth: Feature articles on security strategy, latest trends, and people to know. As Global Conflicts Go Digital, Businesses Need Wartime Gameplans The fate of a Ukrainian tax software company shows how modern cyberwarfare can claim casualties far beyond the battlefield, and how businesses across the ocean still need to protect themselves. Intellect Services could hardly be less interesting. A midsized, family-owned business in Ukraine that sold tax software. Its owners really can't be faulted for not anticipating that they might one day be a huge pawn in a regional cyberwar. To Russian foreign military intelligence, Intellect Services was totally interesting. The company's platform, M.E.Doc, was ubiquitous across Ukrainian businesses. Compromising M.E.Doc they could, in effect, impact most of the country's economy. And like other midsize businesses, the company wasn't likely to have any kind of exceptional cybersecurity defenses getting in Russia's way. The rest is history. The world's most notorious cyber threat actor, Sandworm, planted a backdoor in an M.E.Doc software update that came to be known as "NotPetya." Beyond the damage to Intellect Services, NotPetya caused tens of billions of dollars in damage to thousands of unwitting companies around the world, an example of how cyberwarfare can spill far beyond the borders of warring nations. Nation-states at war won't necessarily look to attack the government or the military, because the private sector can be a much easier target, argued Allie Mellen, a Forrester analyst and author of "Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield." It's very difficult for an enterprise to strike back. A lot of businesses that don't think of themselves as targets in war in fact are, and a lot more executives need to be gameplanning around it, Mellen argued at Zenith Live 2026 in Las Vegas last month. Why Businesses Become