Responding to Russian Cyber-Provocations

Posted: October 23rd, 2016

By Ethan S. Burger

Ethan S. Burger is a Washington-based international lawyer and academic who specializes in cybersecurity, transnational financial crime, and Russian legal matters. He has worked on projects for the Australian Federal Police and the U.S. Department of Justice. He is an Adjunct Professor at Washington College of Law, and currently teaching about cybersecurity at Vilnius University on a grant from the Fulbright Foundation.

By Donald N. Jensen

Donald N. Jensen is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Adjunct Senior Fellow, Center for European Policy Analysis, where he editor of the CEPA Information Warfare Initiative. A former US diplomat, Jensen provided technical support for the START, INF, and SDI negotiations and was a member of the first ten-man US inspection team to inspect Soviet missiles under the INF Treaty in1988. He was a foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaign of Governor John Kasich. Jensen writes extensively on the domestic, foreign and security policies of Russia, Ukraine, and the other post-Soviet states, including for The American Interest, US News, Newsweek, the Voice of America and the Institute of Modern Russia. He is a regular commentator on CNBC, Fox News, and RFE/RL. He has lectured at a variety of universities, including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Oxford and George Washington University. He received his PhD and MA from Harvard and BA from Columbia.

Most political leaders understand that governments that fail to respond to public provocations by foreign states do so at their own risk. In recent years, the U.S. and some of its allies (such as Australia, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, and the U.K.) have been subjected to repeated, sophisticated, and costly cyber-attacks, emanating from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. These waves of attacks have become the “new normal.”

It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine reliably the lines separating the actions of a state, its proxies, organized criminal groups, and its business sector. Cyber-attackers can, to some degree, engage in aggressive cyber-behavior while remaining anonymous. For example, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his coterie may engage multiple intermediaries so that the numerous degrees of separation between the Kremlin and the direct attackers cannot be traced.

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