A former top U.S. cybersecurity official said on Sunday the financial services industry is probably the No.1 target for Russian retaliation if there are U.S-imposed sanctions over Ukraine.
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the government has been meeting with critical infrastructure partners “for many months.”
“They [are] combining it through a series of war games and scenarios playing out how the Russians may respond to any sanctions we could impose,” he said. “And that's, I think, where we get to the financial services industry. And so that's probably at the top of the list as you consider some of the sanctions... And that would be probably the counter move by the Kremlin and some of those security services.”
According to Krebs, the Biden administration cyber response to an attack would likely look like that of the former Trump administration — “put sand in their gear.”
“I think that's unclear,” he said of the Biden administration approach. “I think it's probably a continuation of the prior administration where we enabled the Cyber Command actors and some of those other operators to go out over there under the defend-forward and persistent-engagement philosophy to get into the networks of our adversaries to understand where they are, where they're going and to put sand in their gear, so to speak — and add friction to their operations so they're too busy cleaning up their mess over there rather than coming here.”
He added there could be economic measures and diplomatic measures in response to an infrastructure attack on the United States.
“But at a minimum, what I would expect is, again, targeting of the systems, the infrastructure that the Russian operators use to conduct their attacks and make it so that they cannot do a follow up attack using that same known infrastructure,” he said.
Krebs said he’s been impressed with how fast the Biden administration has been in calling out “bad activity.”
“This is a rapid declassification that in years past, particularly on cyber activities, has taken months, if not a year or more,” he said. “We're seeing it happen in a matter of hours.”
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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