This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 13th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

A new cyber attack affecting several hundred businesses raises the question, didn't this just happen?

And then a few months before that, so what are private and public actors doing about it?

Cato's Brand and Valeriano says not enough.

He argues that strengthening systems

is vastly more effective than state-level retaliation.

We spoke yesterday.

Well, it's just more of the same.

We've seen a proliferation of ransomware, particularly since the pandemic, for two reasons.

One, because more people are at home, more people are dependent on digital connectivity. But two, there's really no global law

enforcement kind of mechanism to enforce these, to enforce consequences on criminal actors.

So Russia, of course, doesn't exactly care what happens, and for them it's a good thing

that the United States is distracted and dismayed at ongoing criminal activity coming from Russia and the post-Soviet Union.

So this is where we are right now.

And the latest attack was Kisea, another virtual monitoring software

platform in many ways similar to solar winds. That's another supply side attack and it had potentially affected 800 to 1500 medium-sized corporations or companies.

Because of the scale they're saying it's the biggest ransomware attack ever, but it's certainly not the most consequential and there's a lot of news and a lot of evidence coming out that Kisea, the software platform itself was unprotected and not exactly at peak form as you might put it.

So it's just a continuation of the same, but the issue for us is really how do we stop this particularly if their groups operating out of Russia?

Given that there is no global effort or global organization that is dedicated to stopping this kind of thing.

I, should we be surprised that this doesn't happen more often?

I'm surprised, honestly, that we don't see more critical infrastructure attacks and that we haven't seen more impactful

attacks on health care systems that even if these criminal actors are a bit reckless,

...