Obama Warns Of Russian Cyber Warfare Threat
President Barack Obama has warned Russia that the United States has "more capacity than anybody" when it comes to cyber warfare, saying hack attacks cannot become “wild, wild, West.”
Obama made the remarks to reporters following the G20 conference in Hangzhou, China. The issue of Russian hackers being implicated in breaching US cyberspace was a key issue at the summit. Though Obama didn't identify specific instances, he said, "We have had problems with cyber intrusions from Russia in the past" and that the goal is to not to duplicate a "cycle of escalation" that has occurred in arms races of the past.
"What we cannot do is have a situation where this becomes the wild, wild West, where countries that have significant cyber capacity start engaging in unhealthy competition or conflict through these means," the president said.
Making a subtle threat to Russia, Obama added, “Look, we’re moving into a new era here where a number of countries have significant capacities. And frankly we’ve got more capacity than anybody, both offensively and defensively.”
US officials have blamed Russia for the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) servers, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies are reportedly concerned about the Kremlin trying to disrupt or undermine the presidential elections. However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has in the past rejected claims that Moscow was behind a recent hack of DNC servers.
In July, the WikiLeaks website released about 20,000 emails from the DNC, which showed that party leaders had purportedly sought to undermine the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.
Clinton Response
The campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton alleged that Russia had released the emails to influence the November presidential election.
But as Obama and Clinton call for discussions of cyber-attacks, experts say that government-led hacking is already booming, and the lack of international guidelines has led to unintended consequences for ordinary civilians caught up in cyber conflict. The US and the United Nations are each working to develop rules of engagement for the digital arena, but in the meantime, countries are deciding for themselves whether or not to follow the same guidelines for cyber capabilities as they do for traditional weaponry.
The US military should be ready and able to hack back against governments who target the country online, Clinton said. She pointed to the breach of the Democratic National Committee as an example of a cyber-attack against the US, and advocated political, economic and military responses to such attacks.
Of course, the US already engages in plenty of cyber warfare. To use Clinton’s words, the US has hacked into a lot of things. But her speech suggests an expansion of this kind of hacking is the best response to the recent Russian intrusions into the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
Clinton’s technology platform doesn’t include an official stance on offensive hacking, but a source familiar with her campaign says that Clinton would likely respond to a cyber-attack through diplomacy and sanctions, with military response as a last resort.
Hacking back has been a matter of policy debate in the US for years, and the question of how to respond to cyber-attacks isn’t entirely resolved. Most of the debate has centered around how to protect US companies from intellectual property theft, but how and why the US should hack a foreign government is a bit of an open question.
The State Department currently views cyber-attacks as similar to physical ones, and bases its policy on presidential strategy.
