NSA head: Dem hacks were ‘a conscious effort by a nation-state’

Adm. Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, is directly blaming Russia for the data breaches at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which he called “a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

At Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, Rogers brushed off claims by WikiLeaks head Julian Assange and others that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime was not behind the attacks, as well as remarks from President-elect Donald Trump that anyone could be responsible.

{mosads}“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind. This was not something that was done casually. This was not something done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” said Rogers at the event.

“This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

In an interview that aired on Moscow-financed news network RT the Saturday before the election, Assange made his first outright denial that leaked emails published on his site came from the Russian government. He has referred to suggestions that he received the hacked Democratic Party documents from Moscow as “McCarthyism.”

But the Obama administration has publicly blamed Russia. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security released a joint statement saying Russia was behind the attacks. The ODNI oversees the nation’s major intelligence agencies.

Rogers went on to say that the administration was attempting to stop nation-state cyber attacks in a variety of ways.

“We’re trying to make life harder for hackers. Quite frankly, we’re trying to harden systems. We’re trying to increase knowledge, we’re trying to increase capabilities in the private sector and the government, we’re trying to engage with a host of nation-states around the world who are engaging with them in terms of what is acceptable and what is not,” he said.