But the news from Moscow may explain how the agencies could be so certain that it was the Russians who hacked the email of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Two Russian intelligence officers who worked on cyberoperations and a Russian computer security expert have been arrested and charged with treason for providing information to the United States, according to multiple Russian news reports. As in most espionage cases, the details made public so far are incomplete, and some rumors in Moscow suggest that those arrested may be scapegoats in an internal power struggle over the hacking. Russian media reports link the charges to the disclosure of the Russian role in attacking state election boards, including the scanning of voter rolls in Arizona and Illinois, and do not mention the parallel attacks on the D.N.C. and the email of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.
But one current and one former United States official, speaking about the classified recruitments on condition of anonymity, confirmed that human sources in Russia did play a crucial role in proving who was responsible for the hacking. The former official said the agencies were initially reluctant to disclose their certainty about the Russian role for fear of setting off a mole hunt in Moscow. The public disclosure of the arrests, and the severity of the treason charge, come at a delicate moment for President Trump. He has been loath to accept the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to help him win, which he sees as part of an effort to delegitimize his election. The Russian role will loom over the conversation with Mr. Putin that Mr. Trump is scheduled to have on Saturday since it was the Russian president who James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, told Congress ordered the hacking and leaking.
One topic of the phone conversation is likely to be the sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia, including ones that were imposed in December in retaliation for the election hacking. For months, Mr. Trump rejected the finding that Russia was behind the hacking, accusing the intelligence agencies of incompetence and political bias. After a classified briefing in New York a month ago, he grudgingly accepted that Russia had a role, while playing down the hacking by noting that China and other countries also hacked the United States. Steven L. Hall, a former C.I.A. head of Russian operations, said it was “very tempting and certainly reasonable” to connect the arrests to the American intelligence findings. But he added a cautionary note: “The rule of law doesn’t apply in Russia, and they manipulate the law to do whatever they want to do. So what they call treason may not be what we call treason.”
Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, noted that the intelligence agencies’ report on the election attack found with “high confidence” that Russia had carried out the election attack, which involved fake news stories and propaganda as well as the hacks and leaks. “It was always pretty obvious that they had more than just the computer evidence,” Mr. Galeotti said. “The arrests are a big deal.” The arrests, according to reports by the Russian newspaper Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, among others, were made in early December and amounted to a purge of the cyberwing of the F.S.B., the main Russian intelligence and security agency. Those arrested by the agency’s internal affairs bureau included Sergei Mikhailov, a deputy director of the Center for Information Security, the agency’s computer security arm, and Ruslan Stoyanov, a senior researcher at a prominent Russian computer security company, Kaspersky Lab.
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Originally Posted by PolWatch
Presidential Commission Warns of Cyber Threats Facing Next Administration December 03, 2016 - A U.S. presidential commission on Friday called on the incoming administration to immediately take steps to enhance cybersecurity in both the private and public sector. 
A cyber warfare expert holds a notebook computer while posing for a portrait in Charlotte.
