WASHINGTON, October 6. /TASS/. The United States and Russia should engage in a whole-of-government dialogue on cybersecurity, Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said in an online interview to Washington Post.
She was asked to comment on the Russian-US cybersecurity dialogue, launched after the meeting of the Russian and US presidents, Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, in Geneva in June.
"This is a difficult, complicated problem and I think to your point about the president’s conversation with the Russians, I think that it’s really has to be a whole-of-government effort," she said.
When asked whether her agency observed anything pointing at a serious Russian effort to tackle cybercrime, she replied: "I have not seen any significant material changes. We have seen ransomware gangs that seem to have gone offline for a period of time. That’s not that terribly unusual. We’ve seen that in the past, where infrastructure will come down and then it will re-emerge. The ransomware gangs will be renamed."
In a phone conversation on July 9, Russian and US presidents, Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, stressed the necessity of constructive cooperation between the two countries in the sphere of cybersecurity, the Kremlin press service said. "Bearing in mind the scale and seriousness of the challenges in this sphere, cooperation between Russia and the United States should be permanent, professional, and non-politicized. It should be carried out via specialized channels of data exchange between the relevant government structures within bilateral legal mechanisms and with due respect to international law," the Kremlin said.