Russian Cyber Swipes Expose U.S. Leadership Gap

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Sometime in early June, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold the nomination hearings for two senior Biden Administration cyber appointees: Jen Easterly for the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), and former NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis for the new National Cyber Director (NCD) position. Both are well respected and very competent. Both will be appearing before a very supportive committee. Both are likely to pass through fairly easily. 

And Congress needs to move fast. We simply cannot afford to be without cyber leadership amid unrelenting foreign attacks. The last several months have presented the Biden Administration and the American public with a litany of increasingly large cyber “break ins,” like 2020’s Solar Winds and this week’s revelation that Russian intelligence broke into 3,000 email accounts of over 150 non-profit and government organizations. Add to this the unprecedented cyber ransom of one of the largest o…