The Biden Administration is planning to host a two-day virtual ransomware summit on Wednesday, the largest international gathering of its kind to date. Russia was not invited; vice-senator would not.
The White House plans for at least 30 countries to attend a series of meetings to be held over Zoom. This summit will be the most extreme step it has taken to build an international coalition to address ransomware, an epidemic of cyber crime where hackers remotely lock victims PCs and demand an extortion payment to fix them.
We see this meeting as the first of many conversations with allies, a senior Biden administration official said on Tuesday on a phone call with reporters. The official requested to not be named as part of the terms of the call.
Notably, Russia was not one of the dozens of countries invited to the summit, the White House official said. The Kremlin is having direct talks with the U.S. on the subject, the official said.
We do look to the Russian government to address ransomware criminal activity coming from actors within Russia, the official said. The White House has had professional exchanges where we have communicated these expectations, the official said.
U.S. law enforcement often knows the identities of key hackers behind ransomware attacks, and many reside in Russia, which does not extradite its citizens and has been reluctant to crack down on those who attack foreign targets.
One major topic of discussion will be how countries can cooperatively trace and disrupt criminal use of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the official said.
Ransomware cost victims an estimated $74 billion in total damages last year, according to a study by the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. The problem is global, although the U.S. suffered more than a thousand known ransomware attacks in 2020 - while the U.S. has those most obvious cases; the U.S. had seen the most widespread.
After hackers attacked a major oil pipeline owner and meat processor earlier this year, the White House launched a multi-step effort to battle ransomware including sanctioning a cryptocurrency exchange that allegedly helped hackers launder their extorted bitcoins into cash.
Vladimir Putin said he told Russian President Biden during a June meeting that ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure from Russian citizens were off limits. Since then, White House has cautioned that it would take months for such conversations to happen.
Jen Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said last week that Russian Ransomware-Hangovers have yet to make any significant changes to their usual rapid speed of attacks.
Also, the European Union will be represented.