all right, let's bring in our guess in birmingham, michigan, richard steen and chief research analyst at i t harvest. richard is also author of the books there will be cyber war and cyber defense countering targeted attacks in toronto, albania, clear minority founder and ceo of pen geo wire group, a geopolitical consultancy, and geneva defined to get chief executive officer of cyber peace institute. stefan has led projects to counter cyber crime and online terrorism. a warm welcome to you all. thanks for joining us today on inside story. richard, let me start with you today. i just like to take a step back for a moment and ask you to explain to our viewers what exactly constitutes a ransomware attack and how it works. yeah, it's pretty straightforward. a attacker find some vulnerability inside a network ground, somebody's computer infects it, and downloads tool, the ransomware software itself that encrypts the complete hard drive making without a key that you know about. so it makes it impossible to get access to your data. if it's spread throughout a large network like calling your p

mundane or it's a sentence chief research analyst with i t harvest and he's joining us live from birmingham michigan via skype. good, happy with us and al jazeera. so thank you very much. so china has made several attacks over the last few years on the us, particularly. what's significant about the reaction to this one. yeah, you're right in the china has had continuous attacks all grass you know, so we kind of give them a break because have to spies working together. this is. ready completely different because it was so widespread used and i know and vulnerable the at the time in microsoft exchange, that was on premise, at 140000 organizations around the world. and now it's been attributed to both china and essentially independent contractors. are hackers in china? and it was used mostly for. ready ransomware tax even though could have been used for stealing emails quite easily, but it is mostly small businesses that were attacked and really phenomenal response between both nato, other european countries. all working together with united states to announce and dino, china all at once. along with th

he joins us on skype from birmingham michigan. good to have you with us . so it seems from these kinds of stories that to hijack information, you know, sort of cyber highest is easier to get away with than the traditional highest where you know, the rubber go out and draw the bank much easier and much less costly to engage in this sort of activity and obviously we, we now have an ecosystem because the renal attackers or another ransomware as a service. so if you're willing to attack somebody, you can just use their to our if nothing that companies can do to protect themselves. it seems incredible that, you know, hundreds of companies can be attacks in one go like this in a, an attack like this is very upsetting to defenders because they, they do extend trust to their software providers. to give them, you know, valid updates. and if an attacker's fiscal good enough is obviously reveal, is to filtrate the software supplier and then install essentially a back door in their software and push it out to you. it's kind of hard, you can do your own evaluation of al

richard steen and he's a chief for such an analyst at i t harvest and he joins us now from birmingham in michigan. richard, as kimberly was saying that president biden has previously tried to draw some lines with russian president person, but it really doesn't appear to have made much difference. so what his options at the moment. yeah, you know, of course his eyes got diplomatic and he used obviously trying to do that. he's got economic men. it takes a long time to impose new sanctions. and at this point, there been a lot of sanctions against russia. they don't see that much impact of course there's military options and nobody wants to see that happen. a cyber option would be, you know, responding in kind no question. and the united states does have extremely powerful cyber capabilities. but there's danger to using them. anytime you a tech, somebody with a special tool or what we call zeroed a vulnerabilities and exploits against those, you immediately reveal your tool and that the target of your attack in this case of b, russia could immediately turnaround. start using those for more ransomware