This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
State-sponsored hacking by Russia presents a threat to American national security, a top FBI official told lawmakers on March 29.
Bryan Vorndran, an assistant director in the FBI’s cyberdivision, told a U.S. House of Representatives committee hearing that the threat from Russia was “very, very real — and current” in both a criminal sense and in the nation-state sense.
Vorndran told lawmakers that instances of Russian hackers “scanning” networks in the U.S. energy sector have increased recently, and he said such activity represents a “reconnaissance phase” by Russia to try and understand a company’s defenses and vulnerabilities.
“It’s an extremely important part of the overall attacks,” he noted, adding that Russia represents “one of the two most capable cyberadversaries we face globally,” and is “a formidable foe.”
In the weeks since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House and the Justice Department have been warning U.S. companies about intelligence suggesting that Moscow has been taking early steps toward possibly launching cyberattacks.
U.S. President Joe Biden last year warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that certain critical infrastructure should be “off-limits” to cyberattacks.
At a Geneva summit with Putin in June, Biden said the two leaders discussed keeping 16 types of critical infrastructure off-limits to cyberattacks, including the energy and water sectors.
Biden noted a month later in a speech to the U.S. intelligence community that a growing number of cyberattacks against government agencies and private industry have been linked to Russia and China and said that a major cyberattack on the United States could lead to an actual “shooting war.”
