Trump's Cyber Skepticism Hasn't Stopped Charges Against Foreign Hackers

President Donald Trump doesn’t put a lot of stock in security researchers’ ability to track down cyberattackers. When the Democratic National Committee’s systems were breached during the presidential campaign, he shrugged and said just about anyone could have been behind the hacks—even though the intelligence community pointed fingers straight at Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking,” he tweeted in December.

Just before Trump was inaugurated, if his unwillingness to endorse the practice of cyber-attribution would derail the Justice Department’s pattern of bringing indictments and charges against foreign hackers—and even embolden hackers to launch more cyberattacks, without fear of repercussions.