Will Another Biden Term Undermine Cybersecurity?

Americans were presented with some bad news last week that was mostly seen as a formality. Joe Biden will be running for reelection in 2024.

This news is bad for Americans for many reasons, but mostly for the fact that President Joe Biden’s first two-plus years in office have served as an unfortunate exercise in “I told you so’s” for many political observers that could clearly see the trouble looming over the horizon in the event the former President Donald Trump would be voted out of office.

If there has been one consistent theme in the past 27 months, it’s been the utter lack of accountability for the consistently atrocious results across all aspects of the Biden presidency. From the economy to foreign policy, and everything in between, America finds herself in a far weaker position than it was pre-COVID.

For starters, the horrifically botched Afghanistan pullout in the summer of 2021 saw a suicide bomber attack at Kabul airport that killed 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. soldiers. Compounding the human tragedy at the time of the U.S. withdrawal was the utter disregard the administration shown to the estimated 78,000 Afghans who worked for the American government that were left behind in the crosshairs of the Taliban by the Biden administration, according to a report from the nongovernmental organization known as the Association of Wartime Allies.

Although the exit from Afghanistan took place more than half a year into the Biden presidency, the long-awaited review of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan that was released on April 6^th of this year offered this ridiculous assertion: "The departing Trump administration had left the Biden administration with a date for withdrawal, but no plan for executing it.”

Joe Biden’s shameless blame-shifting tactics were also on display during the historic event of most of our lifetimes — COVID-19. Biden, in large part, ran on stopping the pandemic.

“I will not shut down the country,” then-presidential candidate Joe Biden promised in 2020. He proclaimed, “I will shut down the virus,” and “I will beat this virus” at the limited public appearances he made while largely “campaigning from his basement.”

Biden even went as far as to blame COVID-19 deaths on Trump personally on numerous occasions during the campaign, in his attempts to influence voters into thinking that the former president singularly possessed the ability to stop the worst pandemic in 100 years, or that Biden himself would wave a magic wand that would somehow paralyze the virus.

In reality, it only took the first nine months of 2021 for COVID deaths to surpass the entire total for 2020. This was despite the fact that as a result of former President Trump’s “Operation Warpspeed,” vaccines were readily available to most Americans for most of 2021.

Also, comparatively recently, Biden seemed to imply that the Trump administration was attempting to shield Russia from liability for the attack when he stated that the attack “certainly fits Russia’s long history of reckless, disruptive cyber activities,” and added that “the Trump administration needs to make an official attribution. This assault happened on Donald’s Trump watch.”

Most of the illicit cyber-activity that has been talked about in the media during the Biden era has centered around the Ukraine conflict, with both sides ramping up offenses since the earliest stages of the war. Although there is a concentration of hacking offenses occurring half-a-world away from the US, there are still major attacks affecting domestic targets on a regular basis, whether we’re hearing about them or not from the Biden-loving mainstream and corporate media.

In 2022, ransomware was deployed in attacks that affected 106 state or local governments or agencies, which represented a sizable increase from the 77 attacks in 2021, with 25% of those 106 incidents resulting in the theft of data.

Last year also saw a multitude of underreported attacks against the United States that were perpetrated by state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. Among the more notable hacks that occurred were the regular cyber-attacks against US defense contractors that originated from Russian state-sponsored actors.

Additionally, the Iranian Advanced Persistent Threat group known as APT 34 targeted organizations across multiple sectors in Africa, Europe and the United States with the support of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

In an effort to curb the relentless onslaught against America, the Biden administration has recently rolled out a new National Cybersecurity Strategy. Although this strategy claims that it intends to “rebalance the responsibility to defend cyberspace by shifting the burden for cybersecurity away from individuals, small businesses and local governments, and onto the organizations that are most capable and best-positioned to reduce risks for all of us,” according to global compliance and litigation law firm Gibson Dunn, private sector entities “can expect to see direct liability, new regulations, and lawsuits from the federal government” if the current proposal is adopted.

The Gibson Dunn alert also warned that “increased (government) enforcement may also be complicated by multiple agencies pursuing the same actions, resulting in the potential for companies having to deal with overlapping and uncoordinated inquiries.”

In other words, this new strategy may create a nightmare situation for private entities struggling to keep their doors open in the midst of a struggling economy by having what has largely been an ineffective executive branch force new compliance standards and costs.

The day-to-day traps that ensnare Americans online are difficult enough to navigate. From online phishing schemes to “Big-Tech” enabled malvertising, every click is a potential trap.

So, with the Biden administration’s track record being less than sparkling, business owners should worry that they may be unfairly scapegoated and find themselves facing penalties as a result of poorly written and thought-out bureaucratic legalese.