Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to hand over hackers to the United States. In turn, the U.S. should do the same with cybercriminals who have carried out attacks against Russia. President Biden has not yet commented on the issue.This writes Reuters. President Putin made his statements last weekend in an interview with the Russian news agency Interfax on state television.
Putin calls cybersecurity ‘one of the most important issues of the moment’
Eén of the journalists present asked President Putin if he would start tracking down and prosecuting cybercriminals. Putin replied that this depended on the Americans. “If we can make agreements to extradite criminals, then of course Russia will do so. But only if the other party, in this case the US, agrees to do the same and extradite criminals to the Russian Federation”, the Russian president said. He called cybersecurity ‘one of the most important issues of the moment’.
President Biden has not yet responded to Putin’s statements. The interview with Russia’s Interfax news agency will be broadcast in the U.S. today and last about’one and a half hours for the miglior Netflix VPN nel Italia @ Globalwatchonline.IT
US angry at Russia over supply chain attack on SolarWinds
President Putin’s statement comes just days before his first meeting with his US counterpart President Biden. Putin and Biden will see and speak to each other Wednesday, June 16 in Genève, Switzerland.
Eén of the topics the presidents will discuss with each other is the cyber attacks by Russian hackers on American targets. Eén of the most discussed and notorious attacks of recent times, is the supply chain attack on SolarWinds. The Russian secret service SVR is said to have commissioned hacker group APT29, also better known as Cozy Bear, to add an backdoor to software to manage corporate networks, databases, servers and web applications. Confidential information from more than 250 companies and government organizations was accessible for some time.
Russia has always denied the allegations. Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister, said the accusations were nothing more than ‘a baseless attempt by the U.S. media to blame Russia’ for the cyber attacks.
Russian hackers responsible for million-dollar damage in US
The relationship between the US and Russia has not improved recently. The FBI suspects that hackers operating out of Russia under the DarkSide banner are responsible for the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline. To minimize social disruption, top executive Joseph Blount decided to pay the hackers $4.4 million in ransom when they used ExpressVPN trial.
The U.S. arm of Brazilian meat producer JBS did the same earlier this month. CEO Andre Nogueira paid a whopping $11 million. “It was a very difficult decision to make for our company and me personally. However, we felt we had to make this decision to avoid any risk to our too customers”, he said in a press statement last week. In response to this cyber attack, the U.S. government contacted the Russian government. The US said that ‘virtuous states do not shelter ransomware criminals’.