What is the Biden Administration’s New National Cybersecurity Strategy?
In December of 2020, President-elect Biden took some time while he was strategizing his transition to President to blame then still-sitting President Trump for what has been repeatedly pointed to by experts as the most wide-ranging reconnaissance hacking incident in history – the cyberattack against SolarWinds.
Playing on “Russia-Trump narrative” that still hasn’t died in many media circles, Biden seemed to imply that the Trump administration was attempting to shield Russia from liability for the attack when he stated that the attack “certainly fits Russia’s long history of reckless, disruptive cyber activities,” and added that “the Trump administration needs to make an official attribution. This assault happened on Donald’s Trump watch.”
Most of the illicit cyber-activity that has become talked about in the media during the Biden era has centered around the Ukraine conflict, with both sides ramping up offenses since the earliest stages of the war. Although there is a concentration of hacking offenses occurring half-a-world away from the US, there are still major attacks affecting domestic targets on a regular basis, whether we’re hearing about them or not from the Biden-loving mainstream and corporate media.
What is the Biden Administration’s New National Cybersecurity Strategy?
In 2022, ransomware deployed in attacks that affected 106 state or local governments or agencies, which represented a sizable increase from the 77 attacks in 2021, with 25% of those 106 incidents resulting in the theft of data.
Last year also saw a multitude of underreported attacks against the United States that were perpetrated by state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. Among the more notable hacks that occurred were the regular cyber-attacks against US defense contractors that originated from Russian state-sponsored actors. Additionally, the Iranian Advanced Persistent Threat group known as APT 34 targeted organizations across multiple sectors in Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States with the support of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
In an effort to curb the relentless onslaught against America, the Biden administration has recently rolled out a new National Cybersecurity Strategy.
Although this strategy claims that it intends to “rebalance the responsibility to defend cyberspace by shifting the burden for cybersecurity away from individuals, small businesses, and local governments, and onto the organizations that are most capable and best-positioned to reduce risks for all of us,” according to global compliance and litigation law firm Gibson Dunn, private sector entities “can expect to see direct liability, new regulations, and lawsuits from the federal government” if the current proposal is adopted.
The Gibson Dunn alert also warned that “increased (government) enforcement may also be complicated by multiple agencies pursuing the same actions, resulting in the potential for companies having to deal with overlapping and uncoordinated inquiries.”
In other words, this new strategy may create a nightmare situation for private entities struggling to keep their doors open in the midst of a struggling economy by having what has largely been an ineffective executive branch force new compliance standards and costs.
Perhaps the most concerning part of the new strategy is the direct liability companies face, as the cybersphere continues to get poisoned with new and innovative strains of malicious code. Attacks using the data theft tool known as EvilExtractor which is readily sold only and can make anyone a hacker for only $59, and adware like Dominant Info that propagates unvetted advertisements that can infect entire networks with spyware, have only grown in frequency in 2023. These kinds of attacks are easy to fall for and may result in large payouts in fines and penalties for companies under the proposed changes.
The day-to-day traps that ensnare Americans online are difficult enough to navigate. From online phishing schemes to “Big-Tech” enabled malvertising, every ad you click is a potential trap. So, with the Biden administration’s track record on cyber matters being less than sparkling, business owners prepare themselves for the possibility that they may be facing penalties as a result of poorly written and thought-out bureaucratic legalese.
Julio Rivera is a business and political strategist, Editorial Director for Reactionary Times, and a political commentator and columnist. His writing, which focused on cybersecurity and politics, published by many of the most heavily trafficked websites in the world.
What is the Biden Administration’s New National Cybersecurity Strategy?
