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But if the hackers use the breach for more nefarious ends — shutting down electrical grids, for example, or wiping out people’s bank accounts or exposing sensitive information publicly — that could provoke a more serious response.
“Sanctions are probably the most politically expedient option,” said Lauren Zabierek, executive director of the Cyber Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “That’s probably the minimum that we can expect out of this from this administration, but I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do especially given their response to previous Russian actions.”
The Trump administration has basically given the Russians a green light by not calling them out
Indeed, top advisers including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo have played down the hack. In a recent interview, Pompeo portrayed it as more of the same from Russia.
“The Russian efforts to use cyber capabilities against us here in the United States is something that’s been consistent certainly for – goodness, I guess I was in Congress six years and now four years in the administration,” Pompeo said on the Ben Shapiro Show.
Given that Russia is unlikely to be deterred, experts argue that the best result will have to be a fundamental rethinking of cyber issues, something that will require new money and more time than the Trump team has left before Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
“We’ve been talking about this for 25 years, and we’re not there,” said Christopher Painter, who was the State Department coordinator for cyber issues before Trump shut down his office in 2017.
“The way you do that is you make this whole area much more of a mainstream national security priority and not treat it as this little boutique-y tech issue, which I think in large part it has been relegated to,” Painter said.
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