Federal Government Information Technology

You Don't Need to Catch Hackers in the Act, but Cyber Attribution is Hard

Nextgov: President-elect Donald Trump is on offense against the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Russian government meddled in the U.S. election, declaring intel officials are in the tank for Democrats and there’s no way to know much of anything in cyberspace unless you catch a hacker in the act.

Trump’s wrong, but not as wrong as many think.

Figuring out who did what in cyberspace is rarely a cut and dried proposition. Attribution requires intense study, extensive documentation and balancing myriad streams of evidence. Even then, intelligence agencies and most private sector threat trackers speak in probabilities and levels of confidence rather than hard conclusions.

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