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Naomi Lim, White House Reporter


NextImg:Biden cybersecurity chief 'surprised' Russia has not hit US targets amid Ukraine war

The country's top cybersecurity official is "surprised" Russia has not targeted critical infrastructure in the United States as President Joe Biden coordinates an international effort against Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine.

"Frankly, I'm surprised that we have not seen attacks against critical infrastructure at home," Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly told the Washington Examiner.

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Easterly attributed the lack of "a specific strike," in part, to the likelihood it would be perceived by Biden as "highly escalatory."

"I also think they've been very, very busy in Ukraine," she said. "Though we very much focus on the kinetic activity because it is so horrific, there's been a lot of cyber activity against [Ukraine's] critical infrastructure, civilian infrastructure."

CISA's Computer Emergency Response Team has helped Ukraine with its cyber defense as the agency takes steps toward working more closely with neighboring Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, which have additionally come under pressure from Russia.

But during a National Press Foundation event, Easterly used the phrase Russia is "a hurricane" and China is "climate change" to describe the national security risks the two countries pose to the homeland.

"China is the thing that I worry about the most," she told reporters. "When you look at the lessons that we're learning from Ukraine, and you think about the lessons that China is learning from Ukraine, they're not going to make the mistake of not going against our critical infrastructure. They're going to cost all that in when they decide to blockade the strait or invade Taiwan."

Easterly, a West Point graduate and 20-year Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan before working for the National Security Agency, former President Barack Obama's National Security Council, and Morgan Stanley as a civilian, called the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok "a significant threat" as well.

"We know that this data is going back to China," she said. "We know China is an adversary nation that has done things with our data, both for espionage, for counterintelligence, for profiling. We also know that every intrusion into data can give a foothold, not necessarily for TikTok but certainly in terms of the overall plan on critical infrastructure for disruption and disruption."

Easterly, too, referenced the "accelerated" advancement of artificial intelligence one day before Biden convened his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to talk about AI at the White House.

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"Nuclear weapons were built by governments that had the incentive to keep them safe," she said. "The incentives of those building AI is all about maximization of profit and business competition. So I think we need a serious discussion about how to realign incentives for the technology."

"AI capabilities don't really have much control over them," she added. "They can be weaponized by bad people for cyber, for genetic engineering, for bioweapons. And so just as they can be used for good, they can be used for really, really bad things by really bad people."