>If lives were lost as a result, would Russia be wrong to use lethal force against the maintainer?
Yeah, unless they want to admit that they’ve been waging war against the entire western world by allowing their homegrown ransomware groups to operate with impunity.
If we go by your logic, Western countries should have turned Moscow into a giant glass parking lot after NotPetya, a destructive wiper worm released by the Russian government targeting the entire world.
Luckily you’re alone with your thinking.
And there are levels of warfare between "nothing" and "nuclear", in case you hadn't noticed. And North Korea and China are doing state-sponsored attacks against US targets, commercial and government and military. It's not clear to me that NoPetya was state sponsored, it's ransomware. The RF is not a bastion of law enforcement and justice; I agree that they do a terrible job of controlling organized crime activities, both cyber and non-cyber.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypeek/open-source-sabotage-...
If you choose to become an actor in a war, then you also open yourself up to being attacked. There is only one kind of actor in a war- combatant.
Consider the maintainer who did the “delete all files on servers with Russian IP addresses.” This could be construed as an act of war against Russia. Would Russia be wrong to commit acts of war against this person? If the server performed some life critical task like operating hospital equipment or air traffic control or whatever, this change could have resulted in loss of life (so many mistakes in using JavaScript in such cases but set that aside for a moment). If lives were lost as a result, would Russia be wrong to use lethal force against the maintainer?
Disclaimer (sad that you have to add this these days; it should go without saying): I only use this as an example. I think Putin is a thug and I think that it goes against most westerners’ values, mine included, for nation states to preemptively invade other nation states. I’m not apologizing for or justifying any act by Russia. I have deep sympathy for people in Ukraine who just want to live their lives and not be killed or have their stuff destroyed.