By Elishya Perera
WASHINGTON DC (CWBN)_United States President-elect Joe Biden pledged to make cybersecurity a top priority of his administration, following a cyberespionage intrusion into the networks of US government agencies and private companies, allegedly carried out by Russian hackers on Monday (Dec 14).
“We need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyberattacks in the first place,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday. “We will do that by, among other things, imposing substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks, including in coordination with our allies and partners.”
The President-elect added that his administration would “elevate cybersecurity as an imperative across the government” by expanding investments in infrastructure and people to defend against malicious cyber-attacks and further strengthen collaboration with the private sector in this regard.
The intrusion on Monday came to light after a prominent cybersecurity firm in California discovered that it had been breached and alerted that foreign governments and major enterprises had also been compromised.
According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the attack had compromised federal agencies and critical infrastructure, although it has not yet been reported on which agencies and infrastructure had been breached.
While neither the CISA nor the FBI has publicly commented on who is believed to be responsible, however, the Washington Post, citing unnamed sources, said that Russian hackers who are part the country’s foreign intelligence service are suspected to have carried the attack.
“This is looking like it’s the worst hacking case in the history of America,” one of the sources said. “They got into everything.”
