McCaul: Without Threat of Retaliatory Cyberattacks, Cyberattacks Against U.S. ‘Will Continue’

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Michael McCaul (R-TX) stated that President Joe Biden should warn Vladimir Putin that if cyberattacks against the U.S. continue, the U.S. will respond with offensive cyberattacks, and without this threat, the attacks against the U.S. will continue.

McCaul said that he thinks Russia is testing Biden and “You cannot somehow dissect Putin from these criminal organizations in Russia. They carry out these ransomware attacks. It’s all interrelated with the oligarchs in Russia. Perhaps he didn’t give direct approval, but certainly tacit approval. To say that Putin was unaware of this and doesn’t benefit from these attacks, I think is a very naive perspective of how Russia operates and who Putin really is. So, I think the president needs to be very forceful. This would be the third ransomware attack in the last couple weeks. We have to have consequences to this behavior.”

He added, “I think the president should be very clear to Putin that if these continue, once we do the attribution, which means finding out the source of the attack, that we are going to hit back and we’re going to respond with a cyber-offensive attack that we’re very capable of doing as a nation. Only until we have that threat to Putin and the Russian criminal organizations will this bad behavior stop. Otherwise, it will continue.”

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