WaPo: "Ransomware attacks won’t stop unless Biden keeps the pressure on Putin"

In a follow-up to to their June 14 op-ed on President Biden's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, Silverado's Co-Founder and Chair Dmitri Alperovitch and the Kennan Institute's Matthew Rojansky argue that President Biden needs to make good on his promise to impose costs on Russia for its failure to stem the tide of damaging Russian ransomware attacks.

"There’s been yet another devastating ransomware attack. This one, right before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, was reportedly carried out by the hacker group REvil, believed to be operating in Russia, targeting an IT operations tool used by about 40,000 companies worldwide. Estimates suggest that the number of affected organizations is about 1,500, some of them smaller businesses that can ill afford to pay either the ransom or the significant IT costs associated with recovering their data and restoring their networks.

To keep such destructive attacks from becoming routine, President Biden was wise to deliver a forceful demand to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday: Putin must put an immediate stop to this activity, or Biden’s administration will take 'any necessary action' to stop it.

Read the full op-ed here.