So much gets lost in the Trump chaos, but this seems important: Last week, the U.S. government issued a joint report from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that described a massive Russian cyber campaign to attack critical infrastructure.
Will this get slow-walked, the way the Russian election hacking was?
Vox reports that this is first time the US government has publicly blamed Russia’s government for attacks on energy infrastructure. That means instead of targeting individual hackers, the U.S. will now respond against Russia.
They can then sanction high-level members of those agencies for the actions of their subordinates. "This makes further hacking operations a lot riskier for not just the hackers themselves but also their bosses and the government that authorized them. It’s a first step toward establishing deterrence in cyberspace," Vox reported.
In the meantime, not all of these things will be connected to Russia. But I bet most of them will:
