Photo: Michael Dedziek

The Biden administration formally accused the Chinese government this week of carrying out the hacks of the Microsoft Exchange email server software. But was the administration's response enough?

In a new article for Lawfare, Silverado's Dmitri Alperovitch and Ian Ward argue that although "naming and shaming" the Chinese for carrying out the Exchange hacks is important, the administration should take the additional step of imposing economic sanctions on the on the contractors who conducted the hacks and the private and state-owned companies that have benefited financially over the years from the CCP's malicious activities.

"Imposing economic sanctions on both the MSS contractors and the private and state-owned companies that have benefited financially over the years from the MSS’s malicious activities, including theft of intellectual property, would send a strong signal that the U.S. will not tolerate these reckless intrusions. It would also allow Biden to overcome the strategic shortcoming of the past administrations which, in the face of rapidly escalating cyber threats from Beijing, repeatedly declined to impose any meaningful costs on Chinese cyber threat actors. This persistent refusal to impose sanctions on China has stood in stark contrast to the United States’ past decisions to sanction its other major geopolitical adversaries—including Russia, Iran and North Korea—for their malign cyber activity, as well as to the approach taken by U.S. allies in the European Union, which has imposed sanctions on China for past cyber intrusions."

Read the full article here.