Biden administration planning to sanction Russia for SolarWinds ...

The Biden administration is preparing sanctions and other measures to punish Moscow for actions that go beyond the sprawling SolarWinds cyber­espionage campaign to include a range of malign cyberactivity and the near-fatal poisoning of a Russian opposition leader, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter.The administration is casting the SolarWinds operation, in which government agencies and private companies were hacked, as “indiscriminate” and potentially “disruptive.” That would allow officials to claim that the Russian hacking was not equivalent to the kind of espionage the United States also conducts and to sanction those responsible for the operation.Officials also are developing defensive measures aimed at making it harder for Russia and other sophisticated adversaries to compromise federal and private-sector computer networks, said the officials, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.Part of the administration’s response, too, will be an attribution statement stronger than the one the intelligence community released in January saying that Moscow was “likely” to have been behind the SolarWinds operation. A White House official said last week that the Russian campaign hit nine U.S. government agencies and about 100 private companies.Russian SVR behind broad cyber espionage campaign that has compromised Treasury, Commerce and other U.S. agenciesBut the aim of the various measures, officials said, is to convey a broader message that the Kremlin for years has used cyber tools to carry out an array of actions hostile to the interests of the United States and its allies: interfering in elections, targeting coronavirus vaccine research and creating a permissive atmosphere for criminal hackers who, among their activities, have run ransomware botnets that have disrupted U.S. public health facilities.In a speech to the Munich Security Conference last week, President Biden said that “addressing . Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and across Europe and the world has become critical to protecting our collective security.”National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that the response, expected in the coming weeks, “will include a mix of tools seen and unseen, and it will not simply be sanctions.” The bottom line, he told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” is that “we will ensure that Russia understands where the United States draws the line on this kind of activity.”The administration also is working on an executive order to improve the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to ensure the resilience of government networks.