In accordance with Section 224 of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, the United States recently issued sanctions on a Russian research center that was directly involved in a cyberattack on a Middle East petrochemical plant in 2017. This attack targeted the safety mechanisms of the plant, which if succeeded, could have led to an explosion that would have killed the workers at the plant. These sanctions make it so that the research center and the people involved with it will have all assets that they own in the United States frozen. The United States specifically responded to this cyberattack because of the threat that it posed to human life. The timing of these sanctions were also purposefully planned as a warning to Russian state hackers that the US would be closely monitoring the election systems to deter potential hackers.
