Christopher Krebs, the former chief of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), has dismissed lawmakers' calls for retaliation in response to a reportedly pervasive cyber-attack on a string of government agencies.
Krebs told CNN's Jake Tapper on State of the Union that lawmakers such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah,) who called for "a cyber response of like magnitude or greater" should be "cautious".
“I’d be very careful with escalating this", Krebs remarked, calling for “a conversation among like-minded countries" about whether there are acceptable forms of cyber espionage, added the former US cybersecurity chief, who quit his post last month after proclaiming the 2020 vote as the most secure one in American history.
Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press, Republican US Senator Mitt Romney referred to the recent hack as "extraordinarily damaging", “an invasion” that has to be retaliated against. He further took a special aim at President Donald Trump’s comments on the data breach, saying “we have come to recognise that the president has a blind spot when it comes to Russia”.
US Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in turn, told ABC that the cyberattack could still be continuing, admitting that officials had not yet determined its full scope.
"This is in that grey area between espionage and an attack", Warner said, albeit backing Romney's calls for a response in kind, saying Washington needed to make clear to its adversaries "that if you take this kind of action we and others will strike back".
Option to ‘Punish’ Russia?
On Sunday 13 December, Reuters reported a massive hacking attack across the United States, with US authorities stating that the major targets were a handful of high-profile government agencies, including the Pentagon, Treasury, and State Department. The attack was reportedly staged by way of compromising the Texas-based company SolarWinds' software.
On Thursday, 17 December, Microsoft, which has helped respond to the breach, revealed that it had identified more than 40 government agencies, think tanks, non-governmental organisations, and IT companies infiltrated by the hackers.
US authorities instantly blamed the data breach on Moscow, with President-elect Joe Biden’s team even allegedly weighing options "to punish" Russia over its purported involvement.
According to AP’s sources, White House officials were poised on Friday afternoon to issue an official statement accusing Russia of perpetrating the hacking attack, but a directive came along at the last moment to stop short of doing so.
Meanwhile, outgoing President Trump threw some cold water on the across-the-board accusations against Moscow. The US president lamented that news media would always rip into Russia rather than look into if China is the culprit. He downplayed the attack as "far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality”.
"Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens", Trump tweeted.
Calls for Teamwork on Cyber Security
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov weighed in on Monday, flatly denying the allegations and calling on the US authorities to stop making “ungrounded accusations against Russians”.
He noted that President Vladimir Putin had already suggested that the US and Russia ink an accord that would stipulate joint efforts in terms of information security. He said the motion would effectively enable the two sides to “cooperate and counter cybercrimes, cyberspying attempts, etc.”
The lack of evidence with regard to the latest hacking attack was also brought up during the Russian president’s annual presser, where he noted that the anonymous sources cited by the media are in fact American officials and intel agents who earlier accused Russia of influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election.