Earlier this year, President Biden delivered a stern and urgent warning to the business community in response to evolving intelligence that Russia could be planning cyberattacks against critical U.S. infrastructure: “If you have not already done so… harden your cyber defenses immediately.” FBI Director Christopher Wray also echoed this warning and added that both China and Russia have been aggressively seeking to find and exploit vulnerabilities to gain access to American companies.
Cybercrime against private-sector targets has already been exploding. The recent 2021 FBI Internet Crime Report discussed “an unprecedented increase in cyberattacks and malicious cyber activity,” with close to 850,000 internet crime complaints reported last year — an 81% jump from 2019. Ransomware attacks alone increased almost 93% in 2021, with more than half of those incidents occurring in North America.