Intelligence bill would elevate ransomware to a terrorist threat

[rbc]

When the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this summer advanced its annual measure to authorize the work of the U.S. intelligence community, it also advanced a controversial proposal to deal with ransomware: treating it like terrorism.

Sponsored by committee chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), the bill contains novel language regarding ransomware that seeks to address increasingly rampant and damaging ransomware attacks by calling out ransomware gangs by name and branding them as “hostile foreign cyber actors”; designating nations that harbor ransomware actors as “state sponsors of ransomware” and slapping such states with sanctions; and granting the US intelligence community greater legal authority to go after ransomware actors by elevating ransomware to the level of a national intelligence priority.
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Intelligence bill would elevate ransomware to a terrorist threat