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Comment by eidelweissflow | Hacker News Reader

“ At a summit in Geneva last month, US President Joe Biden said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin he had a responsibility to rein in such cyber-attacks.”

I don’t understand how Putin can stop these attacks unless he is personally responsible for them.

Imagine someone in the US hacking systems in Russia or China. How in the hell Biden would know who did that and stop them?

The naivety of US government is just astonishing. I’m sure Putin just laughs when he hears such accusations.

We can’t stop these attacks by asking people not to exploit the systems. We can only stop then by building more secure systems and improving the processes within organizations.

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Uh... maybe Russia has a bad rap:

By providing cybercriminals a safe harbor to carry out their attacks.

By refusing to cooperate with foreign LE unless they have targeted RU citizens.

By using the LE/MLAT requests that are sent to them to track down these criminals and force them into moonlighting for state intelligence services or be arrested.

If we, the west, let Russia take Crimea and China take Hong Kong with minimal fuss, I don't see why a few cyber attacks would get more attention.

Take over? I thought Hong Kong was given back?

No, all the worst scenarios happened there.

I was referring to what happened in 2020, when China violated the terms of the 1997 handover.

It was conditionally returned to an authoritarian state with the proviso that they’d not bring their authoritarian policies to HK. Can I just say that many thought this was naive back then? And precisely because there was a lack of confidence in any nation (England and allies) to have the will to enforce the terms of that agreement kinetically. The naïveté was banking on the bright-eyed hope that China would turn a philosophical corner as economic prosperity increased, without any will power for the implied contingency plan (retaking HK). And here we are. Far from blind optimism, this was lazy hopefulness. I’m not advocating empirical crusades - simply saying that former empires (and this includes the US) cannot make red line demands unless they can be believed to dominate a kinetic engagement with a sense of real empirical ownership (resources, culture, institutions). As we see in Iraq and Afghanistan, “nation-building” is a losing exercise in attrition. Again, this should be seen only as an argument that because former empires are not capable of that commitment, they should be far more judicious in painting red lines, jealously guard their commitments to mutual defense, and not hand back occupied territory to bad actors expecting anything less than the whole consumption of those resources by that bad actor. We are about to watch Afghanistan fold back onto itself. I think it’s the right thing to do, hard as it will be to watch, but we should all understand clearly what’s about to happen and not feign surprise - it’s paying the price of a mistake made earlier. We’ve just been delaying the obvious too long. The trick to not being in this position is not putting ourselves and other countries into such positions to begin with. Similarly, England was wrong to hand back HK to the communist regime in China without the full acknowledgement that what is happening now was ever a likely outcome. To wring hands about it now is pointless.

MH17 - 298 killed, 240 of them are from western countries. Not a single response. You are right, if western world doesn't care about their own people’s lives, they will barely care about the cyber attacks.

It may be worth considering if you are naive in thinking that Putin doesn’t explicitly fund and direct the execution of cyber attacks against the west as a lever in improving Russia’s own relative standing.

Why do you think he wouldn’t do so? American sponsors the same cyberattacks on Iranian and North Korean entities.

Define “fund”. I don’t think he directly funds most of those operations simply because there’s no need.

Imagine if Merrick Garland announced that he was using prosecutorial discretion to effectively decriminalize cyber attacks on foreign countries as long as they didn’t affect US interests and the best of its allies. The federal government wouldn’t need to fund the entrepreneurial ambitions of the US talent pool. They’d self-fund and make a mint in the process.

It’s privateering of the modern age. So Putin only “funds” them in the sense that he allows them to operate, providing them implied letters of marque.

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