Putin’s puppet is out of the White House, and there’s a new sheriff in town. The Washington Post is reporting that the Biden administration is preparing to take punitive measures against Moscow for actions that the previous administration downplayed.
The Biden administration is preparing sanctions and other measures to punish Moscow for actions that go beyond the sprawling SolarWinds cyber espionage campaign to include a range of malign cyber activity and the near-fatal poisoning of a Russian opposition leader, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The administration is casting the SolarWinds operation, which hacked government agencies and private companies, as “indiscriminate” and potentially “disruptive.” That would allow officials to claim that the Russian hacking was not equivalent to the kind of espionage the U.S. also conducts, and to sanction those responsible for the operation.
Officials also are developing defensive measures aimed at making it harder for Russia and other sophisticated adversaries to compromise federal and private sector networks, said the officials, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
White House officials have said the SolarWinds operation hit nine U.S. government agencies and about 100 private companies.
But officials told the Post that the punitive measures are meant to convey a broader message about the Kremlin’s hostile cyber activities against the United States, including interfering in elections, targeting coronavirus research, and tolerating criminal hackers who are using ransomware to disrupt against U.S. businesses, including health facilities.
Last week, Biden told a virtual meeting of the Munich Security Conference that dealing with “ Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and across Europe and the world has become critical to protecting our collective security.”
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the response to Russia will include measures that go beyond sanctions.
The measures are also intended to hold Russia accountable for other actions such as the poisoning and imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
In the computer hacks, the Russians used malware-infected software updates from the Texas company SolarWinds as a steppingstone to hack the computers of U.S. government agencies and private companies.