U.S. officials warn businesses of possible cyberattacks following sanctions on Russia

Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley details the U.S. intelligence reports outlining potential targets for Russian cyberattacks as retaliation for sanctions imposed.

Video Transcript

- Let's switch gears now. A big question out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a concern over cyber attacks, Ukraine saying government websites have come under DDoS attacks. That announcement coming this morning. Apparently, banks in the country have been targeted, as well.

But now there could be US implications, as well. And for more on that, let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley. Dan, we're hearing from some US officials that businesses need to be careful about ransomware attacks after Biden announced those Russia sanctions yesterday. What are the details on that?

DAN HOWLEY: That's right, Brian. We're seeing a lot of kind of chatter about how the US is preparing for a potential cyber attack. We actually saw in New York State the governor and mayor of New York City gathering for their unveiling of a new cyber kind of command center, where they would protect the city and state and the various municipalities against cyber attacks, and especially coming at this point in time.

Now, there are cyber attacks going on against the Ukraine, or Ukraine, basically hitting their websites, shutting them down with direct-- directed denial of service attacks. That's basically where you take a whole bunch of different computers, tell them to access a website. The website can't handle that many requests, and just shuts down. So that's what we're seeing right now.

The fear, though, and according to experts that I spoke to specifically here in the US, is that Russia could already have backdoors built into systems that we rely on, whether that's infrastructure [INAUDIBLE] power plants to government websites to things like banking institutions. They've proven that they can intrude into those systems before. And so the fear, then, is that if they were to launch an attack, would they be able to do something like hit the power grid, hit things like dams or power plants, and just take them offline.

So that's really where experts are warning we could see if there is the potential for an attack. And one expert I spoke to basically said, look, it's going to happen. Don't panic when it does, but recognize that this is kind of a new kind of warfare.

Now, would that lead to something greater, you know, an actual armed conflict? That's really kind of so far afield from what would happen here when it comes to cyber attacks that it's not even a question that it would happen. I think with cyber attacks, though, it's definitely something we're going to see. We've seen Russia intrude into US systems, obviously in the 2016 election and afterwards. So it kind of is almost a foregone conclusion that we would see some kind of interference from Russia.

- Yeah, the disruption to critical infrastructure is something that's been talked about for some time. And really, the vulnerabilities on that front, too. So certainly hoping that things have beefed up as a result. But we'll be watching that one closely. Thanks so much for that, Dan.