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WASHINGTON: The incoming White House chief of staff said on Sunday (December 20) that President-elect Joe Biden’s response to the massive hacking campaign uncovered last week would go beyond sanctions.
Ron Klain said Biden was plotting ways to deal with suspected Russian hackers who have penetrated half a dozen US government agencies and exposed thousands of US companies.
“They are not just sanctions. They are steps and things we could do to degrade the ability of foreign actors to participate in this type of attack,” Klain said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Options the Biden administration is considering to punish Moscow for its alleged role include financial sanctions and retaliatory attacks on Russian infrastructure, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The Kremlin denies any role in piracy. Speaking at an event to mark the centenary of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised its work and said he was impressed by the “difficult professional operations that have been carried out.”
Biden, who becomes president Jan. 20, would likely have bipartisan support for a forceful reaction to the spy campaign, lawmakers said Sunday.
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said the data breach was “extraordinarily damaging” on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“This demands a response,” he said. “This is something we have to address as soon as possible.”
US Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told ABC that the hack could still continue and officials have yet to determine its full scope. But it fell short of the aggressive language used by Romney, who called the hack “an invasion.”
“This is in that gray area between espionage and an attack,” Warner said. Still, he backed Romney’s call for retaliation, saying Washington needed to make it clear to adversaries “that if they take this kind of action, we and others will fight back.”
Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also said the United States “would have to deter and respond,” but also invest more in cyber defenses.
He told MSNBC that in some cases, the digital cleaning of US networks “may mean burning down the entire system to make sure that when we rebuild it they are not there.”
Cybersecurity officials and professionals across the United States are still struggling to control the scale of the hacking campaign, which used US technology company SolarWinds as a springboard to infect the company’s Texas customers, including Departments. of the Treasury, Commerce and Energy.
Up to 18,000 clients were left open to hackers, but CEO Kevin Mandia, whose company FireEye helped uncover the piracy, told CBS that he estimated that “only about 50 organizations or companies, somewhere in that area,” they were “really affected”.
Klain told CBS that much is still unknown.
“I think there are still many unanswered questions about the purpose, nature and scope of these specific attacks,” he said.
