If this continues to happen we are looking at a really bleak future. There is an -insane- amount of money at stake here. How many meat/farm futures got affected by just taking out the meat industry this time? How much money can these people get not just by the ransomware attack, but by also knowing how fucked an industry is about to be and cashing out.

When they can do this shit with impunity it's a problem. And there's potentially a lot of money available.

This is all just ignoring the fact that some of this might be state sponsored.

I think it's time to start getting some sort of cooperation from said nation states and allowing us to help take out some of their trash.

Because the other option is to treat this like state sponsored attacks on our infrastructure and no one is going to like that.

Cyber warfare, whether ransomware or espionage, is largely asymmetric. Why would these other countries want to play ball when they have everything to gain?

The answer tends to be that you make them cooperate by attaching additional costs to the actions, in order to make them less attractive. These costs come in two major forms, which we might want to categorize as passive and aggressive.

Passive costs might include: - Sanctions - Investigation/Arrests

Aggressive costs might include: - Offensive hacks - Military response

The issue here seems to be that the passive responses aren't likely to be strong enough to dissuade the other actors, while the aggressive responses are too costly. Aggressive counter hacks might just normalize cyber hacking and espionage, and the US is on the wrong side of that asymmetric gamble. Normalizing the behavior would be likely to make it worse than it already is!

Military responses go too far. You can't reaaalllly militarily respond to another nuclear power. Not directly. The potential outcomes there are almost uniformly bad. If you want to play the longer game maybe you do some poking and prodding by supporting third party combatants (IE: Soviet support of Vietnam against the Americans) or political opponents. But there aren't really that many great options on that front today for Russia or China.

So that leaves trying to increase the cost of the passive responses. This is kind of troublesome with China, since they'll just throw identical costs right back at you. It's a bit more possible with Russia, but Europe's entanglement with their power sector screws everything up. And it's not like we're lacking on Russian sanctions as it is.

You can try to play a strong defense, but that's kind of like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound at this point.

Yadda yadda yaddad, I don't know what to do but I think it's an interesting problem!

Edit: Maybe I shouldn't say European entanglement with Russian power sector. I suppose it's more appropriate to say gas sector?