of a roughly $4.4 million ransom that Colonial
Pipeline paid to hackers responsible for a
ransomware attack that caused gas shortages
for days. It secured a court warrant in April that
gave it remote access to hundreds of computers
to counter a massive hack of Microsoft Exchange
email server software.
Vorndran spoke after participating last week
in a Silverado Policy Accelerator discussion in
which he said the FBI was moving away from
“an indictment and arrest first model, and to the
totality of imposing costs on our adversaries.”
“That probably is a simple way of saying we’re
really trying to work with everybody, public and
private sector partners, to understand the totality
of the capabilities and the authorities that exist
... so that we have the biggest impact at the
moment in matters,” he said in the interview.
Indictments, a bread-and-butter tactic of law
enforcement, can lock accused hackers inside
their home countries and put adversaries on
notice that their actions have been detected.
But their practical impact is often limited since
there’s generally minimal chance of a defendant
being brought to the U.S. for trial.
Perhaps the first prominent example was a
2014 case against five Chinese military hackers
accused of siphoning secrets from major
American corporations. In the years since,
federal prosecutors have charged North Korean
computer programmers in hacks of Sony
Pictures Entertainment; Russian intelligence
agents in a breach of Yahoo; Iranian hackers in
an attack on a small dam outside New York City;
and Chinese operatives with targeting firms
developing vaccines for the coronavirus.