The ‘Global Cybercrime Problem’ Is Actually the ‘Russia Problem’
John P. Carlin,Chair of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber & Technology Program/The Atlantic
Convincing Putin that further attacks will trigger automatic, severe responses is the best path to deterrence.
A series of explosive Department of Justice filings—outside the special counsel’s probe—makes clear that Russia is a rogue state in cyberspace. Now the United States needs a credible system to take action, and to sanction Russia for its misdeeds.
Consider what we learned from last month’s criminal charges filed by the Department of Justice against the “chief accountant” for Russia’s so-called troll factory, the online-information influence operations conducted by the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. The indictment showed how Russia, rather than being chastened by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s detailed February indictment laying out its criminal activities, continued to spread online propaganda about that very indictment, tweeting and posting about Mueller’s charges both positively and negatively—to spread and exacerbate America’s political discord. Defense Secretary James Mattis later told the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, that Vladimir Putin “tried again to muck around in our elections this last month, and we are seeing a continued effort along those lines.”In October, a 37-page criminal complaint filed against Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, who is alleged to have participated in “Project Lakhta,” a Russian-oligarch-funded effort to deploy online memes and postings to stoke political controversy, came along with a similar warning, from the director of national intelligence. Those charges came in the wake of coordinated charges filed this fall by U.K., Dutch, and U.S. officials against Russia and its intelligence officers for a criminal scheme to target anti-doping agencies, officials, and even clean athletes around the world in retaliation for Russia’s doping scandal and in an apparent effort to intimidate those charged with holding Russia to a level playing field. There’s also new evidence that Russia has been interfering in other foreign issues, such as a recent referendum in Macedonia aimed at easing that country’s
acceptance into Europe.At times, it’s seemed like every week this year has brought fresh news of Putin acting as the skunk at the global internet party. This fall also saw a new report from the security firm FireEye that concluded that the code used to attack a Saudi petrochemical plant came from a state-owned institute in Moscow.Moreover, it’s also become more clear that the “global cybercrime problem” is actually primarily a “Russia problem,” as Putin’s corrupt government and intelligence services give cover and protection to the world’s largest transnational organized crimes, cybercriminals, schemes, and frauds that cost the West’s consumers millions of dollars. Earlier this year, the Justice Department broke up one cybercrime ring based in Russia whose literal motto was “In fraud we trust.” The Justice Department charged 36 individuals, many of whom live in Russia beyond the law’s reach, and outlined a scheme by which they stole more than a half-billion dollars. It’s hardly the only example from this year; last week, the FBI announced that it had dismantled two other cybercrime rings and charged eight people—seven of them Russian—with running a multimillion-dollar ad-fraud scheme. (Three of those charged were able to be caught overseas in friendly countries that respect the rule of law: Malaysia, Bulgaria, and Estonia.)Ferreting out cybercriminal and intelligence operations and making them public are two prongs of a three-part strategy to change behavior. In recent years, we’ve gotten really good at the first two parts. In fact, while for years these cases were hidden away inside the government, we now release them routinely. This fall, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that the Justice Department was changing its approach to election-meddling cases, with the default now to make such cases public as quickly as possible. The change coincided with the criminal complaint against Khusyaynova, detailing that the attacks on our elections are a problem of right now, not just a theoretical issue.