Cyber Attacks: The Challenge of Attribution and Response

The report reviews the December 2020 SolarWinds supply-chain attack—attributed to Russia’s SVR—highlighting its scale and sophistication, the difficulty of confident attribution, and broader issues around nation-state and criminal cyber operations (including Accellion, Lazarus, and ransomware campaigns like Darkside). It examines consequences for policy and response (sanctions, EO for federal contractors), challenges in rules of engagement for cyber incidents, and recommends focusing on attacker objectives, TTPs, and threat intelligence-enabled defenses.