Taking the Fight to Hackers as Anti-Democratic Forces Continue Their March
November 10, 2021
The fight against ransomware attacks is significant and growing in importance, and we know that U.S. elections infrastructure is full of potential vulnerabilities that foreign-based hackers could potentially exploit. I and many others have argued for a whole-of-government approach to tackling this threat, including action in concert with other like-minded countries to go on the offense against the cybercriminals.
In a promising development, this week the U.S. Department of Justice announced aggressive actions against two twenty something-year-old hackers who have been involved in numerous high-profile, destructive ransomware attacks.
First, the Department unsealed charges against Ukrainian Yaroslav Vasinskyi for attacks against “multiple victims, including the July 2021 attack against Kaseya, a multi-national information technology software company.” Polish authorities arrested Vasinskyi in early October, and U.S. officials have requested his extradition. According to the DOJ announcement, related interviews and searches were carried out in multiple countries at the same time.
DOJ also said it seized $6.1 million dollars in “funds traceable to alleged ransom payments received by Yevgeniy Polyanin, 28, a Russian national, who is also charged with conducting Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware attacks against multiple victims.”
REvil is the organization that undertook “the single largest global ransomware attack on record,” the hack of software provider Kaseya, an operation that shut down hundreds of businesses around the world because of interruptions to their systems.
These are exactly the kinds of tools the U.S. and its partners are going to have to deploy to counter this threat. Naming and shaming of these cybercriminals is important, and hopefully Poland will agree to extradite Vasinskyi. (Most of the indictments DOJ has handed down in the past few years related to cybercrime, including the hacking during the 2016 presidential election, are unfortunately for individuals located in countries that will never agree to extradition, such as Russia.)
Depriving these organizations of their funds is also vital to these efforts, as was done in this most recent announcement, and the U.S. government has immense technical tools at its disposal to continue doing so.
At the same time the United States and its partners were taking action to protect our critical infrastructure from foreign-based attacks, the kind of authoritarianism these hostile actors support continues to spread. For example, this week, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was re-elected to a fourth term in elections widely considered to be un-democratic and wracked with fraud.
U.S. President Joe Biden released an uncharacteristically harsh statement calling out the “sham elections.” It said, in part:
“What Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, orchestrated today was a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic…They shuttered independent media, locked up journalists and members of the private sector, and bullied civil society organizations into closing their doors. Long unpopular and now without a democratic mandate, the Ortega and Murillo family now rule Nicaragua as autocrats, no different from the Somoza family that Ortega and the Sandinistas fought four decades ago.”
The U.S. and other countries are threatening sanctions against the Ortega regime, a tool frequently used to punish authoritarian behavior and to try to compel changes. Unsurprisingly, countries such as Russia endorsed Ortega’s re-election, which may be part of a troubling anti-democracy trend in Latin America.
President Biden has talked frequently about the global fight between democracy and authoritarianism as the defining struggle of this current era. These two developments this week are different sides of that same coin — we have to protect our democracy and keep fighting authoritarianism simultaneously. It’s the same battle.
At the USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative, our slogan says it all:
“Our candidate is Democracy.”
Marie Harf
International Elections Analyst, USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative
Marie Harf is a strategist who has focused her career on promoting American foreign policy to domestic audiences. She has held senior positions at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, worked on political campaigns for President Barack Obama and Congressman Seth Moulton, and served as a cable news commentator. Marie has also been an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.