Russia has yet to unleash its full capacity in cyberattacks on the United States, an intelligence official warned on Tuesday.
Adm. Mike Rogers, who leads U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, said that while China hacks U.S. targets more frequently, Russia has more capabilities than China that it hasn’t chosen to use.
“If you look at volume and nation-state wise … [China] is the one we’ve been the most vocal about,” Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “If the perspective is capability, if you will, I have been very public in saying we’d probably [say] the Russians.”
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Rogers was responding to a question from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asking him to clarify the intelligence community’s assessment. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the committee this year that the Russian cyber threat was “more severe” than previously assessed, but intelligence officials have been more vocal about China.
China has hacked a variety of public and private U.S. targets, most notably the Office of Personnel Management. The breach was the largest in U.S. history, and resulted in the theft of more than 20 million classified personnel files.
Russia, which has a central cyber command infrastructure similar to the U.S., has hacked unclassified servers in the State Department, Defense Department and White House, but its breaches have never approached the scale of the OPM incident. The revelation that the country could do more damage than China, but has simply chosen not to do so, is notable.
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“Although we must be prepared for a large, armageddon-scale [attack] that would debilitate U.S. infrastructure, that is not the most likely scenario,” Clapper told the committee. “We foresee an ongoing series of low-to-moderate level cyberattacks from a variety of sources over time, which impose cumulative costs on U.S. economic competitiveness and national security.”
“The breadth of cyber threats posed to U.S. national and economic security has become increasingly diverse, sophisticated, and impactful,” Clapper added.
Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., attributed America’s diminished cyberdefenses to the lack of a policy on deterrence. “Our adversaries view our response … as timid and ineffectual. Put simply, the problem is a lack of deterrence. The administration has not demonstrated to our adversaries that the consequence of continued cyberattacks against us outweigh the benefit.”
