Consider Biden’s strategy for dealing with ransomware attacks. These attacks involve hackers who steal a corporate or government entity’s information and/or lock an entity out of its own systems. The hackers then demand a ransom payment before returning control to the entity in question.
Unfortunately, while the Justice Department has seized some ransom payments after they have been paid, Biden seems happy to absolve foreign governments of responsibility for allowing attacks in the first place.
Take the example of this May’s Colonial Pipeline hack. Disrupting the pipeline’s operation, Russian-based hackers from the DarkSide group caused major disruption to East Coast energy supplies. But as the Washington Examiner reported at the time, these hackers aren’t criminals on the run. They are tolerated by the Russian government. Indeed, Kremlin security officials are cozy toward the hackers. They have good reason to be so. In return for tolerating ransomware attacks abroad, Kremlin officials get a slice of the ransom pie.
