Other countries and organizations including China, Iran, North Korea – which the USA says was behind the 2015 attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment – and Islamic State have been named as bad actors in cyberspace by Lisa Monaco, Obama’s top homeland security and terrorism adviser.
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The allegations date back as far as the Democratic National Convention, during which party officials tried to change the focus on WikiLeaks releases of hacked emails by claiming the Russians did it as a plot to get Republican nominee Donald Trump elected.
Lauer then listed off Putin’s many actions in opposition to United States or allied interests – including his annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, his support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, his support for Iran, and Russian intelligence’s reported involvement in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s email.
Taking questions from reporters for more than 20 minutes on her campaign plane, Clinton said both Democrats and Republicans should be concerned about Russia’s behavior. The tracks led to Russian hackers linked to the Russian government.
Administration officials said they are still weighing their response.
Speaking to reporters after the G-20 worldwide summit in Hangzhou, China on Monday, Obama said he wanted to avert a new arms race between countries utilizing increasingly sophisticated cyber warfare techniques: “We’ve had problems with cyber intrusions from Russian Federation in the past, from other countries in the past”.
Clinton has previously tied Russian intelligence services to the cyber hack on the Democratic National Committee. “The important thing is the content was given to the public”, Putin stated. And cyberattacks could disrupt vote tabulations being transmitted to state-level offices.
“I have a lot of concern” about this year’s election, said Ion Sancho, the longtime supervisor of elections in Leon County, Fla.
Particularly vulnerable is electronic balloting from overseas.
Russia has been in the vanguard of a growing global movement to use propaganda on the Internet to influence people and political events, especially since the political revolt in Ukraine, the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia and the imposition of sanctions on Russia by the United States and the European Union.
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“The man has very strong control over a country”, Trump said. “The main themes seem to be orchestrated rather high up in the hierarchy of the Russian state, and then there are individual endeavors by people to exploit specific themes”.
