The Obama administration yesterday launched the first-ever sanctions program to financially punish individuals and groups outside the United States that are engaged in malicious cyber attacks.
US President Barack, in an executive order, declared such activities a “national emergency” and allowed the US Treasury to freeze the assets and bar other financial transactions of entities engaged in cyber attacks.
Under the program, first reported by the Washington Post, cyber attackers or those who conduct commercial espionage in cyberspace can be listed on the official sanctions list of specially designated nationals, a deterrent long-sought by the cyber community.
The move, which the paper said has been in development for two years, comes after a string of high-profile cyber attacks ranging from corporate hacks targeting Target, Home Depot and other retailers, to an attack on Sony and other data breaches.
Subjecting cyber criminals, companies that benefit from commercial espionage and even foreign intelligence operatives, to tough financial sanctions could have a “momentous” effect in deterring the growing number of cyber attacks seen daily on US networks, said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cyber security firm.
“Today, the White House is making yet another huge leap forward in the effort to raise the cost to our cyber adversaries and establish a more effective deterrent framework to punish actors engaged in serious intentional destructive or disruptive attacks,” Alperovitch wrote in a blog posted on the company’s website.