Read https://rewardsforjustice.net/rewards/foreign-malicious-cybe... and notice how the USG only cares if the hackers are acting under the direction of a foreign government. Hacking for profit sadly gains more acceptance as a legitimate form of enterprise each year, similar to corporate raiding. You can buy insurance to cover ransom payments. There's also hackers who hack into consumer PCs, routers, and phones where instead of holding you to ransom they just MiTM HTTPS to inject ads, rent out access to DDOSers, or let companies like Cox actively listen to your microphone. A lot of devices like Lenovo have been known to come pre-hacked before they even leave the factory. It's all above the board at this point. Rather than being treated as terrorists, the worst consequences you'll see for them usually is just a lawsuit.

This fits the bill for terrorism in my mind, it is an intentional act to directly affect the people of a nation, and if it causes even one death it becomes way more likely the law will see it as such. Who knows when (one of these events will eventually cause a response from fed) cyberattack becomes synonymous with terror attack, though. Could be this one, could be the future (hypothetical) attack on Fox News or CNN, could be someone turning off the sewage treatment plant for DC, one of them will ruffle the right feather, eventually.

Call / email your congressmen and tell them to stop stalling on the Ukraine defense bill.

THe nice property of terrorist attacks is that the terrorist groups need somebody in the country where the attack actually happens. You might be too late to catch them, they might commit suicide etc, but in general, that property makes law enforcement work a whole lot easier. With ransomware, even if you can say with 100% certainty that Dmitrij Smith from St. Petersburg did it, this still doesn't get you any closer to putting said Dmitrij smith behind bars in the US. It's highly likely that you can't even interrogate / surveil the suspect, making it that much harder to see if they were acting on their own and out of pure greed or on government orders. And that's if you know who did it, cyber attack attribution is complex, and you often can't say anything with certainty.

> the same kind of government response a terrorist attack gets.

Has that particular kind of response ever achieved anything?

(Anything germane to the concern at hand, I mean - of course it has often achieved enriching well-connected contractors and such)

Invade a country that had nothing to do with it?

I don’t want to live in whatever world you’re dreaming of

What - invading an unrelated country?