The Biden administration announces that the White House will host a two-day international online conference dedicated to ransomware threats. The summit will start on Wednesday and is the largest global meeting of its kind yet.
Surprisingly, Russia is not invited.
Ransomware is a global threat
The Biden administration plans to have a series of meetings with representatives from more than 30 countries over Zoom. Such high attendance clearly shows that more and more countries take the ransomware issue seriously.
The talks are supposed to lead to a global effort in confronting ransomware attacks, where the hackers lock the victims’ computers or data. The victims have to pay a ransom to gain access to their data back.
Most of the payments are made in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are later converted into cash. That’s why one of the most important topics will be international cooperation in tracing and disrupting the illegal use of cryptocurrencies.
Russia is not invited, even though it hosts many of the major actors
What strikes the most is Russia’s absence from this virtual summit. The White House official said there is no need for their presence, as Washington is directly speaking to Kremlin about this issue. Russia hosts some of the most dangerous hacker groups, as evident by what the latest ransomware statistics reveal.
During their meeting in June, President Biden told Russian President Putin that ransomware attacks from Russian residents against U.S. critical infrastructure would be severely punished.
However, Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated that there is no significant change observed in Russian hackers’ activity and that they are maintaining their usual rapid pace of attacks.
Due to the increasing danger, companies and individuals should consider investing in top-of-the-line antivirus software with ransomware protection.
