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In the first face-to-face between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, as expected, the issue of cyberattacks was touched upon and the fight that both nations must maintain against ransomware attacks on critical infrastructures.
After the summit in Geneva, President Biden said the conversation was conducted in positive terms making the Russian leader understand the seriousness of these computer crimes.
According to Biden, he asked Putin to put himself in his place it would be felt if a “ransomware attack brought down your oilfield pipelines.” Although he did not let know what Putin’s response was.
Also, The US president assured that he made it clear to his Russian counterpart that if there is a next time the United States will respond: “If in fact they violate their basic rules, we will respond.”
For President Joe Biden it was important to talk about the responsibility that countries have in whose territory criminals carry out ransomware activities. Therefore, he announced that agreed to entrust experts from both nations to work on understandings both in what is outside the limits such as tracking cases originating in other countries.
On the part of the , it was learned that he expressed similar concerns about a attack on computer systems and pipelines in Russia months.
However, the tone of Putin did not go beyond what was expected and what little he referred to the Colonial pipeline attack by Russian cybercriminals only stated: “What do the Russian authorities have to do with this?”
Let us remember that on May 7, the group of hackers DarkSide is attributed He saw the sabotage of the important “Colonial Pipeline” oil pipeline in the United States and requested a ransom to free the computer systems . So it would have received the amount of about $ 5 million in bitcoins for the firm to obtain the necessary decryption tools to unlock the computer system of the largest fuel pipeline in the country.
Money that could later be rescued by the FBI, at least a large part. However, then, also the largest meat processor in the country, JBS, suffered an attack on its computer system by Russian hackers who requested a reward of $ millions of dollars to free the attacked systems.
In this case, from the meat processor, the FBI quickly identified the cybercriminals. The investigation office said the attack was attributed to a Russian group called REvil.
At least, it seems that the US president knows the ways of his Russian counterpart and knows that These conversations, although positive, have limitations: “Having a conversation is one thing, but this must be supported by practice ”.
