One month after President Joe Biden warned Americans to prepare for cyberattacks from Russia, a US official said that Washington still has yet to detect any.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has assessed that Russia has not breached US systems, with agency head Jen Easterly saying the administration has “not seen attacks manifest here.”
“To date, we have not seen specific attacks on the US. What we are concerned about is the fact that Russia’s malicious cyber activity is part of their playbook,” she said in a statement on Thursday.
Easterly did mention that American economic penalties could provoke Russian cyber operations in the future, despite the lack of such breaches to date. “We are very concerned that as the war drags on, there may, in fact, be retaliatory attacks given the very severe sanctions we have imposed on the Kremlin, the US and our allies,” the agency head continued.
In a March 21 speech, Biden told Americans that “the magnitude of Russia’s cyber capacity is fairly consequential, and it’s coming,” ominous warning of major hacks on the horizon. The Biden administration has issued several similar alerts that have failed to materialize.
The White House has warned for months that Moscow could deploy chemical weapons and has even shipped protective equipment to Kiev’s forces to prepare for such an attack. On April 6, however, a series of unnamed US officials told NBC News that “there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine,” adding that Washington hurled the accusation merely to “deter Russia from using the banned munitions.”
