Russia hacking claims pose challenge for Biden – BBC News
Russia hacking claims pose challenge for Biden BBC News
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After Biden Meets Putin, U.S. Exposes Details of Russian Hacking Campaign
For now, it is the ransomware attacks that have moved to the top of the administration’s agenda, because of their effects on ordinary Americans.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said days after the summit that it might take months to determine whether the warning to Mr. Putin resulted in a change in behavior. “We set the measure at whether, over the next six to 12 months, attacks against our critical infrastructure actually decline coming out of Russia,” he said on CBS. “The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so we will see over the course of months to come.”
It was unclear from the data provided by the National Security Agency how many of the targets of the G.R.U. — also known as Fancy Bear or APT 28 — might be on the critical infrastructure list, which is maintained by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. At the time of the attacks on the election system in 2016, election systems — including voting machines and registration systems — were not on the list and were added in the last days of the Obama administration. American intelligence agencies later said Mr. Putin had directly approved the 2016 attacks.
But the National Security Agency statement identified energy companies as a primary target, and Mr. Biden specifically cited them in his talks with Mr. Putin, noting the ransomware attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shut down in May, and interrupted the delivery of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel along the East Coast. That attack was not by the Russian government, Mr. Biden said at the time, but rather by a criminal gang operating from Russia.
In recent years, the National Security Agency has more aggressively attributed cyberattacks to specific countries, particularly those by adversarial intelligence agencies. But in December, it was caught unaware by the most sophisticated attack on the United States in years, the SolarWinds hacking, which affected federal agencies and many of the nation’s largest companies. That attack, which the National Security Agency later said was conducted by the S.V.R., a competing Russian intelligence agency that was an…
Reviewing President Biden On Cybersecurity
In the wake of the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack, cybersecurity remains a key focus of the Biden … [+]
On May 1st, 2021, President Joe Biden achieved his first 100 days in office and many had concrete expectations for these first 100 days. This historical milestone has long served as an indicator of what new administrations set out to do during their overall term. Policies begin to form, teams begin to get put together, and most importantly, spending begins to take shape. There is no way around the fact that technology begets spending and with the priorities we have as a country, it all begins on where and how investments are made. The big picture is what matters here and the next 1,000 days of visibility (and beyond) are a more proper time frame.
Damning Intelligence Report
The U.S. Intelligence community delivered an extensive annual report on threat assessments in early April. Composed by eighteen agencies, the report outlined major threats to the United States, including the increasing influence of nation-state adversaries such as China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, as well as cyber threats from terrorist organizations and criminal enterprises. Beating on the drum of cybersecurity, our adversaries have weaponized technology and have deployed missions to disrupt our critical infrastructures in just about every vein of society.
How to Build Off Critical Threats
The biggest takeaway from the U.S. Intelligence report is that we are in a world of challenges and potential hurt. The report was quickly followed by a recent cybersecurity executive order from President Biden on May 12th. While it certainly is a welcome step to protect federal infrastructure, it is still a far cry from the two way partnership needed to protect critical and strategic infrastructure run by private enterprises such as the Colonial Pipeline. The truth is while we look to the government to take up the cybersecurity mission, the weakness of one becomes the weakness of many. The tech industry must meet federal, local, and state resources somewhere in the middle because governments cannot be the sole responsible party to defend critical national infrastructure. We…
Biden Revokes and Replaces Trump Order That Banned TikTok
TikTok’s woes subsided with Mr. Trump’s election defeat. Though the company is still under scrutiny with the Biden administration’s new executive order, analysts say the dramatic ups and downs for the company will significantly dwindle.
James Lewis, a senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Biden administration had shown no easing of the government’s strong stance against China. But the new order lays out much more precise criteria for weighing risks posed by TikTok and other companies owned by foreign adversaries like China.
“They are taking the same direction as the Trump administration but in some ways tougher, in a more orderly fashion and implemented in a good way,” Mr. Lewis said. He added that Mr. Biden’s order was stronger than the Trump-era directive because “it’s coherent, not random.”
Under the new system outlined in Mr. Biden’s order, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo would be empowered to “use a criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis” to examine software applications designed, manufactured or developed by a “foreign adversary,” including China, according to a memo circulated by Commerce Department officials and obtained by The New York Times.
“The Biden administration is committed to promoting an open, interoperable, reliable and secure internet,” the memo said. “Certain countries,” including China, “do not share these democratic values.”
On Wednesday, administration officials would not go into specifics about the future of TikTok’s availability to American users or say whether the U.S. government would seek to compel ByteDance, which owns the app, to transfer American user data to a company based in the United States. Amid a number of successful legal challenges waged by ByteDance, a deal to transfer the data to Oracle fell through this year shortly after Mr. Biden took office.
Administration officials said a review of TikTok by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the body that considers the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies, was still continuing and separate…