Cyberwarfare Concerns Increase With Russia-Ukraine Conflict

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine heats up, so do the concerns about cyberwarfare.

"We know that Ukraine has been a test bed for Russian cyberattacks for at least the last half decade," said Dan Patterson with CBS News Technology.

On Wednesday, there were several more of those so-called nuisance cyberattacks, targeting multiple Ukrainian government websites and even banks.

"These aren't real deep systems or critical infrastructure attacks, rather they launch distributed denial of services these are DDoS attacks designed to take websites offline, some defacement attacks, and they did launch a few wipers, meaning they erase data on hard drives," added Patterson.

The attacks prompted the National Cyber Security Center to issue warning, one of them to British organizations urging them to bolster their online defenses. And now some wonder if the United States is next, but Patterson said not so fast.

"According to the FBI and other law enforcement, we have not seen acts of Russian aggression targeting United States critical infrastructure. That is not to say they're not capable of it," Patterson went on.

Last year after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Joe Biden addressed the nation about their conversation, which included cybersecurity.

"I talked about the proposition that certain critical infrastructure should be off limits to attack, period. By cyber or any other means, I gave them a list, if I'm not mistaken, I don't have it in front of me, with 16 specific entities," the president said.

Those entities range from the energy sector to our water system. And President Biden says both Russia and the United States came to an understanding.

"We agreed to task experts, both our countries to work on specific understandings about what's off limits and to follow up on specific cases," said President Biden on the 2021 briefing.