Russian hackers have given Donald Trump his chance to refight the last election – Telegraph.co.uk

Meanwhile, the foreign hackers havent been in hibernation. The APT acronym stands for Advanced Persistent Threat. The Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear groups are persistent ursine offenders. Theyre doing this the entire time, a Washington, DC cyber-security expert familiar with political campaigns tells me. But the media are interested now because theres an election coming.

Nor were the American media much interested in Russian hacking before the Trump campaign of 2016. There are grounds to believe that Russian hackers were inside American servers during Obamas first term. During his second term, the evidence could no longer be denied. In 2014, Dutch intelligence infiltrated the Fancy Bear group and concluded that it had hacked the Obama White House, the State Department and the Democratic Party. In August 2015, the Cozy Bear group was linked to a spear-phishing attack on the Pentagons email system which caused the temporary shutdown of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs communications.

The Obama administration knew this, but the Democrats didnt declare Russian hacking to be a national security crisis until Donald Trump won the 2016 election. In American politics, truth is a partisan commodity. So Robert Muellers failure to implicate Trump in the 2016 leaks hasnt stopped the Democrats and most of the American media from claiming that Trump is dubiously accommodating to Vladimir Putin.

Its the height of responsible statecraft for Hillary Clinton to have committed Obamas first-term State Department to a reset with Russia, but its treason for Trump to try the same. Its statesmanlike of Obama to have looked the other way in 2014 and 2015, when Russian hackers were inside the servers of the White House and the Pentagon. But its somehow irrelevant that Trump defended the integrity of the 2018 midterms by directing the US military to block the Internet Research Agency, the St Petersburg-based troll farm that had spread misinformation during the 2016 campaign.

No wonder that Trumps base will look for the hands of the deep state in the timing of this latest expos of Russian hacking. Americas intelligence agencies seem to have shaped much of the Russian hacking narrative. They might be doing it again now.

If a Covid-19 vaccine is found, the recipe will be shared quickly. The opportunity the Cozy Bear hackers see in the Covid-19 honeypot might not be strategic, but commercial: the chance to get ahead in the manufacture and sale of vaccines. This looks more like a criminal enterprise than a political one, but if the Democrats use it to attack Trump, they will make a political error.