What Can Biden Do About Russian Hackers? Not Much
A Q&A with CrowdStrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch on Fancy Bear, ransomware and the rising threat of North Korea.
Cyber-Cyrillic.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
Meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin last month, U.S. President Joe Biden presented a list of 16 critical infrastructure “entities” that must be “off-limits” to cyberattacks. This raised a fairly obvious question: Is everything else fair game, then? And another: Just what do you think you can do about it, Joe?
The latter is something the U.S. and its Western allies have been struggling with openly ever since Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. It has become increasingly pressing given ransomware attacks like that on the Colonial Pipeline. Yet Putin has a solid advantage in plausible deniability — how can anyone prove these groups are directly tied to the Kremlin? — and it’s unclear that he could really stop them if he wanted to.