Tag Archive for: Bidens

FBI advised that hackers scanned networks of 5 US energy firms ahead of Biden’s Russia cyberattack warning

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The FBI issued the notice days before President Joe Biden publicly warned that Kremlin-linked hackers could target US organizations as the Russian military continues to suffer heavy losses in Ukraine and as Western sanctions on the Kremlin begin to bite.

Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger said during Monday’s White House briefing that Russia had been conducting “preparatory activity” for cyber attacks, which she said could include scanning websites and hunting for software vulnerabilities.”

The so-called “preparatory activity” that Neuberger mentioned Monday is likely “not about espionage, it’s probably very likely about disruptive or destructive [cyber] activity,” US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said Tuesday on a phone briefing with industry executives and state and local government personnel, according to three sources on the call.

There are at least 18 US companies in other sectors, such as defense and financial services that were subjected to the scanning, the FBI said.

There are no confirmed breaches related to the scanning, but the FBI advisory is the latest in a chorus of warnings from US officials to critical infrastructure operators to be on alert for potential Russian hacking. “The magnitude of Russia’s cyber capacity is fairly consequential and it’s coming,” Biden told business executives on Monday.

The Russia-based Internet Protocol addresses, or data that identifies a computer, are “believed to be associated with cyber actors who previously conducted destructive cyber activity against foreign critical infrastructure,” the FBI said in its advisory.

“This scanning activity has increased since the start of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, leading to a greater possibility of future intrusions,” the FBI memo states.

CBS News first reported on the FBI advisory.

For months, the US departments of Energy, Treasury and Homeland Security, among others, have briefed big electric utilities and banks on Russian hacking capabilities, and urged businesses to lower their thresholds for reporting suspicious activity.

CNN reported on February 2 that a foreign hacking group had probed the computer networks of US electric utilities that operate…

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Biden’s Defense Nominees Push for Countering Cyber Threats and China’s Tech Progress

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The Defense Department needs to pursue cybersecurity improvements and creative, agile operational concepts to quickly reach technological advantages and prepare for concerning potential elements of next-generation warfare, according to several of President Joe Biden’s nominees for top agency roles. 

“Today, we have entered a new era of strategic competition and we must update our policies, our operations, our capabilities and our workforce to meet the moment,” said Alexandra Baker, the administration’s pick to serve as the deputy Defense undersecretary for policy. “I believe that there is no time to waste.” 

Baker spoke Tuesday at a nomination hearing held by the Senate Armed Services to consider Nickolas Guertin to be the DOD’s director of operational test and evaluation; John Coffey to be general counsel of the Navy; and Douglas Bush to be the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology. 

Echoing the Defense secretary and interim guidance from the administration, Baker referred to China as a “pacing” challenge and threat. 

“It is the only competitor that is capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system,” she said. “To meet this challenge, we will need to invest in capabilities that are relevant not only to the last fight—but to future ones.”

The hearing comes not long after the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and as the nation faces increasingly serious threats in cyberspace, like complex new risks to critical infrastructure and ransomware attacks that have immobilized American schools and hospitals. During the hearing, the nominees noted that non-state and state actors are quietly working to exploit America’s vulnerabilities in the virtual domain and developing powerful weapons to use in the real world—such as hypersonic missiles, which travel much faster than the speed of sound. 

“I think that [China has] pursued a strategy of seeking to blunt U.S. advantages over a number of years. So not only in terms of hypersonics, but space and counter space, cyber—all of these are areas that,…

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Biden’s response to China hack seen as tepid due to US economic ties with Beijing | Washington Examiner

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When the White House announced President Joe Biden rallied American allies to condemn China’s state-sponsored hacking, many in Washington were perplexed as he bypassed more punitive measures.

China’s Ministry of State Security, which U.S. intelligence officials accused of cyber spying and hacking for profit, was behind multiple “zero-day” exploits that breached the Microsoft Exchange Server, prompting Biden’s response. The attacks take advantage of security holes in widely used software, such as the Microsoft Exchange email service, and can operate undetected until the hole is patched.

WHITE HOUSE DEFENDS BIDEN’S ‘COORDINATED’ RESPONSE TO CHINESE GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED HACKERS

Asked this week why Biden seemed to hold off on a stronger condemnation of China, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, “That was not the intention he was trying to project.”

The effort to coordinate multilateral partners from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and NATO “was under [Biden’s] direction,” Psaki said. “He continues to feel its important to lead from a position of strength in close coordination with our partners and allies around the world, and he takes the malicious cyber activity — whether it’s from Russia or China, whomever the actors may be — quite seriously.”

She said economic ties with China wouldn’t stop further U.S. retaliation if deemed necessary.

Dmitri Alperovitch, who leads the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington, D.C.-based cybersecurity think tank, questioned Biden’s inconsistent response in a blog post in light of a forceful retaliation to the SolarWinds breach that U.S. intelligence linked to Russia earlier this year.

“Having drawn a red line in the case of the SolarWinds breach … the United States ought to calibrate its responses to subsequent attacks relative to that line,” he wrote. “By every conceivable technical standard, the Exchange hacks were the more damaging and more reckless of the two actions. For the sake of both strategic and normative consistency, the administration should be prepared to impose more serious consequences.”

It is hard to say why the Biden administration has refrained from using…

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Biden’s Cybersecurity Team Gets Crowded at the Top

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(Disclosure: I have worked with nearly everyone mentioned in this article at the Aspen Institute, where most were engaged in the public-private Aspen Cybersecurity Group. I also coauthored a 2018 book on the US government’s approach to cybersecurity with John Carlin.)

With the exception of the Justice Department’s team, the key cyber players share a special background as veterans of Fort Meade, the base of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command. Beyond Nakasone, Inglis spent nearly 30 years with the civilian side of the NSA, rising to be its deputy director. Before her appointment earlier this year, Neuberger founded and led the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate and previously served as its chief risk officer, carving out a unique public voice for an agency not normally known for its public engagement. Easterly, who worked in the NSA’s elite hacking team known as the Tailored Access Operations, in 2009 helped design, along with Nakasone and others, what later became US Cyber Command.

That shared NSA DNA is a belated admission, of sorts, of how long cybersecurity took a back seat in the government’s wider bureaucracy. When the Biden administration went looking post-election for senior, respected leaders who had worked and thought about these issues for years, it really only had one talent pool to draw from.

The NSA and Cyber Command, for its part, moved rapidly during the Trump administration to regularize more aggressive offensive cyber operations. Nakasone, as WIRED reported last fall, has carried out more offensive operations online in his nearly three years heading the dual-hat arrangement than the US government had ever done prior to his tenure—combined. In recent months, US Cyber Command has begun to focus its attention not just on nation-state adversaries but also on transnational organized crime, which US officials increasingly point to as having risen to a scale and sophistication that equals the threat from established online adversaries like Iran and China.

The Biden White House, though, is still very much sorting out its own approach to cyber issues, from Chinese tech companies to ransomware. While Inglis, Neuberger, Monaco, Easterly, and Nakasone are…

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