Security News > 2021 > October > The White House's international summit on ransomware: Biggest cybersecurity takeaways
This week the White House held a summit with various nations to address the threat of ransomware.
The White House held a virtual ransomware summit this week with over 30 countries in attendance-although a few notable nations were excluded, such as China, Russia and North Korea.
The focus of the summit was establishing a mutual response to ransomware tactics that hackers are capitalizing upon with assistance from disparate cryptocurrency standards.
The joint statement of the summit from ministers and representatives says: "Governments recognize the need for urgent action, common priorities, and complementary efforts to reduce the risk of ransomware. Efforts will include improving network resilience to prevent incidents when possible and respond effectively when incidents do occur; addressing the abuse of financial mechanisms to launder ransom payments or conduct other activities that make ransomware profitable; and disrupting the ransomware ecosystem via law enforcement collaboration to investigate and prosecute ransomware actors, addressing safe havens for ransomware criminals, and continued diplomatic engagement."
These countries have historically been harder to work with or flat out deny any request by law enforcement to take any action. There is also a deep geopolitical strategy at play with all of the countries involved. The countries excluded may see cyberspace as an essential resource for furthering their agenda and have no desire to stop cyberattacks at the state or cyber-criminal level."
"The sheer number of countries whose opening remarks centered around significant ransomware attacks that disrupted their country's critical infrastructure sectors. We hear a lot about the U.S. being a big target, but the reality is cybercriminals only have a handful of countries they won't target."