PoliticoCan Joe Biden whack Russia for its latest big hack?
- Retaliation is the easy part, but calibrating the entire US response will be far more delicate task
- Donald Trump has suggested that China might be responsible for hacking rather than Russia
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Natasha Bertrand and Nahal Toosi on politico.com on December 21, 2020.
US President-elect Joe Biden was already preparing to take office amid a worsening coronavirus pandemic and a slumping economy. Now he’ll also have to deal with a major national security threat: an unprecedented hack on US government agencies and private companies that could take months, if not years, to rectify.
The hack, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr have publicly attributed to Russia, constituted a major intelligence failure, experts say. The extensive cyber espionage campaign – which affected key agencies like the Department of Energy, State Department and Department of Homeland Security – went undetected for months until a private cybersecurity firm noticed suspicious activity in its networks and alerted the National Security Agency.
With fewer than 30 days until President Donald Trump leaves office, Biden’s administration will be tasked with booting the hackers out of systems they spent months burrowing into and deterring Russia from trying again – without escalating the response into a spiralling cyberwar.
“We have a lot of options,” said Dave Kennedy, a former NSA hacker who founded the cybersecurity company TrustedSec. He pointed to sanctions, retaliatory cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns as some of the tools in NSA and Cyber Command’s toolbox that the incoming administration should consider utilising.