General promises US 'surge' against foreign cyberattacks

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Gen. Paul Nakasone broadly described “an intense focus” by government specialists to better find and share information about cyberattacks and “impose costs when necessary.” Those costs include publicly linking adversarial countries to high-profile attacks and exposing the means by which those attacks were carried out, he said. Nakasone jointly leads the National Security Agency the chief intelligence agency tracking foreign communications, and U.S. Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s force for offensive attacks. President Joe Biden directly pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin in July to take action against cyber attackers, telling reporters, “We expect them to act if we give them enough information to act on who that is.” FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said “there is no indication” yet that Russia had acted to crack down on ransomware. Biden said in July that Russia had already begun efforts to spread misinformation regarding the 2022 midterm elections, calling them a “pure violation of our sovereignty.” Nakasone declined to detail allegations against Russia, saying intelligence agencies were “generating insights which will move to sharing information in the not too distant future.” U.S. agencies are not aware of any specific threats related to the California gubernatorial recall election that concludes Tuesday, Nakasone said.