Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, said his company had seen a "massive escalation" in cyber-attacks tied to the Russian government since sanctions were imposed last year over Moscow's actions in Ukraine.
Developing nations are regarded as key contributors to the Human Variome Project (HVP; http://www.humanvariomeproject.org), a major effort to systematically collect mutations that contribute to or cause human disease and create a cyber infrastructure to tie databases together.
One answer is to seek new roles: cyber-defence, and building ties with India and China.
"Over the past two years, a number of significant cyber incidents have been tied to Iran in one way or another," he writes.
Senator John Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement the indictments showed "the close and mutually beneficial ties between the cyber underworld and Russia's government and security services".
Thanks to a multiplicity of different protagonists and a hornet's nest of random ties and connections, cyber-realist stories do not so much move forward as spread out to ricochet around whole neighbourhoods, cities and beyond, pointing up the interconnectedness of just about everything.
So why are CIOs still fighting cyber criminals with one hand tied behind their backs?
Online "hacktivists" have already launched cyber attacks on companies that cut ties to WikiLeaks, including MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc. and PayPal Inc.
Washington has said the cyber-attacks could damage China-US ties.
A series of recent breaches at United Airlines, Anthem and, most recently, Sabre Corp. and American Airlines are reportedly tied to state-sponsored cyber attackers.
