Mr. Biden walked out of the meeting with a certain amount of professional respect for Mr. Putin as an adversary. For his part, Mr. Putin said: “There was no hostility.” At one point, Mr. Biden asked the Russian leader how he would feel if Russian gas pipelines were attacked from afar, a comment that some interpreted as a threat to the Russian leader.
For months, the ransomware gangs have been in retreat, and recently Russian police, based on information from the US, arrested a group they called criminal hackers. But now there are fears that ransomware gangs could be unleashed, as could hacker groups such as Sandworm, which has been linked to the GRU, a Russian military intelligence arm. Sandworm is believed to be responsible for the hacks on the Ukrainian power grid and several targets in the United States.
For more than a month, Jen Easterly, director of the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency, has been posting a series of tweets she calls “Shields Up” and public speaking engagements to promote greater resiliency in privately controlled national computer networks.
Together with the British, the FBI and the National Security Agency, Ms. Easterly’s agency recently revealed the technical details of a new strain of malware it discovered. It turns out that it came from one of the most devastating attacks ever carried out, which was directed at Ukraine in 2017.
For the largest US banks and utilities, this was old news: they had been studying Russian attacks on Ukraine and other countries for years. But for companies that have invested far less in repelling attacks, resiliency takes time to improve, so no one thinks that last-minute warnings about blocking vulnerable systems, while useful, are enough.
For years, the US government has warned that Russia has injected malicious code into US networks, including the power grid, that could be activated at a later date. (United States did the same in Russia.) But until now, Russia has hesitated to use this “sleeper code”. Some speculate that US-imposed sanctions could entice Russian leaders.
Then there’s the issue of “digital consequences,” a phrase Ciarán Martin, former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, used to describe attacks on Ukraine that “spread outward to undermine businesses and governments around the world.”