Commerce Secretary urges businesses to be vigilant against ransomware attacks

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Ransomware attacks “are here to stay, according to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, urging businesses to plan accordingly.
• These attacks caused gasoline shortages in May, closing schools, compromised meat processing, and delaying transportations.
• Russia is being suspected to be the cause of some or all of these attacks.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned Sunday that ransomware attacks “are here to stay,” and that businesses should have been planning correspondingly.

“The first thing we have to recognize is this is the reality, and we should assume and businesses should assume, that these attacks are here to stay and, if anything, will intensify, Raimondo said. “And so just last week the White House sent out a letter broadly to the business community urging the business community to do more.”

The secretary, who appeared on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” refused to point a finger at Russia when asked whether the Biden administration should look into punishing Russia.

“We are evaluating all the options and we won’t stand for a nation supporting or turning a blind eye to a criminal enterprise,” the secretary said. “And as the president has said, we’re considering all of our options.”

The former Rhode Island  governor said that when President Joe Biden meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “this will be at the top of the agenda.”

What is a ransomware attack?

When a business or organization’s computer system was hacked by breaching its security system. The entire system is locked up until the hackers are paid the “ransom.”

According to Raimondo, Biden’s proposed infrastructure plan can help prevent international hackers.

“Certain components of the American Jobs Plan provide for investments to shore up the nation’s cyber infrastructure,” she told Stephanopoulos.

Raimondo said that businesses can make “simple steps like two-factor authentication, having proper backups and backup technology, can be enormously helpful against a wide variety of these attacks.”

She added that those in the private sector have to be “more vigilant… including small- and medium-sized companies.”

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called the ransomware hackers “very malign actors” who can shut down major aspects of the economy.

Granholm urged both the private sector and the public sector “to work together.”

She reminded that Pres. Biden is “working with allies, and with countries around the world, because other countries, even Russia, they don’t want to see their sectors attacked by malign actors, by rogue non-state actors, not to mention state actors.”

Source: POLITICO