The Biden administration is preparing sanctions and other measures to punish Moscow for actions that go beyond the sprawling SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign to include a range of malign cyberactivity and the near-fatal poisoning of a Russian opposition leader, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The administration is casting the SolarWinds operation, in which government agencies and private companies were hacked, as “indiscriminate” and potentially “disruptive.” That would allow officials to claim that the Russian hacking was not equivalent to the kind of espionage the United States also conducts and to sanction those responsible for the operation.
Officials also are developing defensive measures aimed at making it harder for Russia and other sophisticated adversaries to compromise federal and private-sector computer networks, said the officials, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. Continue reading.