The Russia watchHow Russia hacked America; Putin’s return on2016 hacking investment; more cyberattacks coming, and more

PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: Trump’s denial of Russian meddling (Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact)A mountain of evidence points to a fact: Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. In both classified and public reports, U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered actions to interfere with the election. Those included the cyber-theft of private data, placement of propaganda against particular candidates, and an overall effort to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process. One man keeps saying it didn’t even happen. When the nation’s commander-in-chief refuses to acknowledge a threat to U.S. democracy, it makes it all the more difficult to address the problem. For this reason, we name Trump’s claim that the Russia interference is a hoax as our Lie of the Year for 2017.

How Russia hacked America—and why it will happen again (Caitlin Cadieux, Sophia Myszkowski and Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic)
Russian-backed psychological cyber warfare will only get better.

Putin happy with return on investment for hacking 2016 election, officials say (Ryan Sit, Newsweek)
For less than a half-million dollars, Russian President Vladimir Putin got what he most wanted out of the Kremlin’s campaign to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election: a destabilized American democracy and Hillary Clinton out of his hair, U.S. officials say.

The shadows keep on changing: The persistent Russian threat (Nick Espinoza, Forbes)
I have written in the past about why America’s infrastructure is seriously at risk from hackers, both state-sponsored or otherwise. Enter the Russians. They’re excellent at hacking and have sponsored a legion of hackers willing to perform cyber and information warfare against their targets. They have hit multiple international targets over the years in this way, the most visible (outside of the U.S.) being Ukraine.

Russian cyber-activists ‘tried to discredit Scottish independence vote’ (Severin Carrell, Guardian)
An expert in Russian cyber-operations has accused Russian activists of running a disinformation campaign to discredit the Scottish independence referendum result, by wrongly alleging it was rigged.

Fingerprints of Russian disinformation: From AIDS to fake news (Linda Qiu, New York Times)
“Today, the fingerprints of Russian disinformation campaigns have been left on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mark R. Jacobson, a professor at Georgetown University and former Pentagon adviser, told a congressional hearing in November. “Whether it is ‘Brexit’ or the American election, Russian propaganda still infects U.S. social media networks,” Dr. Jacobson said. “And we see the same sort of divisive propaganda that we saw during the Cold War.”

U.S. officials, lawmakers warn more cyberattacks coming (New Delhi Times)
The United States is bracing for another wave of cyberattacks focused on disrupting or undermining the 2018 midterm elections, with some officials warning this is just the beginning of a much deeper and broader threat. Intelligence and security officials, as well as policymakers and other experts talking both on the record and on background say what began with a Russian effort to influence the 2016 presidential election has evolved. They expect the next round of Russian efforts to be more sophisticated and more widespread, likely to include a combination of disinformation campaigns on social media along with the potential hacking of vulnerable targets.

Only half the states targeted by Russian hackers in 2016 have asked for follow-up briefings (Kevin Collier, BuzzFeed)
The lack of contact raises questions about how closely DHS and the states are working together to head off any hacking of elections systems ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Ex-intelligence, national security officials file brief in lawsuit against Roger Stone (Max Greenwood, The Hill)
Fourteen former national security, intelligence and foreign policy officials filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit against the Trump campaign and GOP operative Roger Stone. The brief was not filed on behalf of either party in the lawsuit, and officials behind the filing could not disclose classified information. The lawsuit was brought against Stone and the Trump campaign in July by three private citizens whose personal information was hacked during a breach at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) last year and published on WikiLeaks.