I strongly recommend that you read this op-ed at Reuters from Foreign Policy columnist James Bamford. The gist of it is that motive and opportunity aren’t enough to assign blame for the hack of the Democratic National Committee. Here’s a snippet:
The problem with attempting to draw a straight line from the Kremlin to the Clinton campaign is the number of variables that get in the way. For one, there is little doubt about Russian cyber fingerprints in various U.S. campaign activities. Moscow, like Washington, has long spied on such matters. The United States, for example, inserted malware in the recent Mexican election campaign. The question isn’t whether Russia spied on the U.S. presidential election, it’s whether it released the election emails.
Then there’s the role of Guccifer 2.0, the person or persons supplying WikiLeaks and other organizations with many of the pilfered emails. Is this a Russian agent? A free agent? A cybercriminal? A combination, or some other entity? No one knows.
There is also the problem of groupthink that led to the war in Iraq. For example, just as the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the intelligence establishment are convinced Putin is behind the attacks, they also believed it was a slam-dunk that Saddam Hussein had a trove of weapons of mass destruction.
It might have been the Russians. It might have been any of a dozen other organizations or groups. There just isn’t enough evidence to make a conclusive determination.
What’s the worst case scenario? I think that would be blaming the Russians if the Russians weren’t responsible. Not only will that further alienate the Russians but it will take attention away from the actual culprits.
The real solution might be to tighten up on security but to do that they’d need to start taking advice from someone who actually knew what they were doing and wasn’t a politician. Mustn’t have that.
