Josh Earnest Quotes

Increasingly, we are seeing cyber attacks coming from states, organs of states. The most recent and troubling of these has been Russia.

Cyber-enabled theft of trade secrets by state actors in China has emerged as a major threat to our economic and, thus, national security.

It shouldn't just be Russia we're concerned about, because many countries that are not our friends have been hacking into American accounts across the board.

Cyber attacks from foreign governments, especially China, Russia, North Korea along with non-state terrorist actors and organized criminal groups constitute one of our most critical national security concerns. They're leaning everything about us and we don't have - wanna have any servers in the basements, by the way folks.

The two most capable nation state adversaries in the cyber domain are clearly Russia and, of course, China. And I do think Russia poses a huge threat in the way they have used the cyber domain. That, to me, by the way, is the big issue here, is Russian interference in our political process, in our election process. And that is an egregious act by them. And they will continue to do that and I think more aggressively than they have in the past. And I think it's something Americans, all American citizens need to be aware of.

We need to make it very clear - whether it's Russia, China, Iran or anybody else - the United States has much greater capacity. And we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information, our private-sector information or our public-sector information.

I think that we're now deep into a struggle for control over the Internet and there are various actors - state, corporate, civic, criminal and military. The great genius of the Internet is its interconnectedness, but this is also what makes it an incredibly difficult problem when things start to go wrong with it and when people exploit for their own purposes.

China and Russia are regarded as the most formidable cyber threats.

Cyberattacks have become a permanent fixture on the international scene because they have become easy and cheap to launch. Basic computer literacy and a modest budget can go a long way toward invading a country's cyberspace.

I am well aware of the facts presented by numerous security experts on the many ways in which the United States' digital networks have come under siege by cybercriminals and under daily assault by hackers in league with various foreign governments.

Look at what is happening in China and in Russia. They have units that are specifically targeted cyber warfare. They are carrying it out. Our critical infrastructure is attacked thousands of times a day.

There are two kinds of people in America today: those who have experienced a foreign cyber attack and know it, and those who have experienced a foreign cyber attack and don't know it.

The Chinese are engaging in a huge amount of cyber-espionage… So do we…. We can’t ask the Chinese to stop doing something that we’re doing. We can’t ask them to obey rules that we don’t ask France and others to obey…. I think it’s going to take a while even to figure out even the rules we would like everyone to adhere to that we are prepared to adhere to ourselves.

States will also have trouble acting anonymously in cyberspace, as private companies are increasingly willing and able to identify the sources of cyberattacks. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant made headlines in 2013 when it exposed a covert Chinese military cyberunit responsible for stealing massive amounts of data from U.S. government and corporate networks. In February 2015, the Russian security software firm Kaspersky Lab claimed to have identified spyware from an unnamed Western government on computers in 30 countries. And in January 2016, the cyber-intelligence firm iSIGHT Partners determined that a Russian group was probably behind a successful attack on the Ukrainian power grid.

There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.

It is interesting that cyberwarfare is developing into something conventional and attacking objects, infrastructure, and critical services.

I have no doubt that Russia tried to meddle in our election. They're going to continue trying to - just like they have my entire lifetime.

Bad actors like Russia, Iran, and China have demonstrated time and time again they have both the capabilities and the intent to use the cyber domain as an operating space to wreak havoc.

We are at war, if you will, in the cyber domain now, constantly battling countries, such as Russia or China, who are trying to do everything from steal our technology to influence our elections to put out disinformation about the United States.

We know hackers steal people's identities and infiltrate private e-mails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.

I would like to repeat: I know absolutely nothing about [hacker's attacks], and Russia has never done anything like this at the State level.

With hacking getting more and more sophisticated, the hacking community has gone from the hobbyist in the basement to huge sophisticated companies that are essentially doing this, or groups of people or foreign agents inside and outside the United States.

There are a number of countries that we see cyber-attacks emanating from. And, again, they can be just individuals who are located in the country. But three that I think are of special concern would be Iran, would be Russia, and China.

Russia and other countries have been hacking and attempting to attack American institutions for years, that Russia's attack on American elections has been going back for over 50 years. So this is nothing new. And the fact that this particular hack was perpetrated by Russian entities is something that no one is disputing.