Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Democrats Left the Door Open to Russian Hacks

The party's headquarters could have done better to protect itself from cyberattacks.

June 15, 2016 at 2:30 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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Photographer: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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Writing about the latest Russian government-sponsored cyberattack his firm had to deal with, Dmitri Alperovich of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike noted it was rare for clients to want to publicize these breaches. The Democratic National Committee, however, had a good reason to go public: It claimed that the Russians had been looking for opposition research on Donald Trump.

Given how the U.S. media love to hate Trump, sinister theories could be expected to emerge, and they did. The New York Times, for example, mentioned “a subplot to the race: Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, previously advised pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, including former President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine.” The image that springs to mind is of Russian spies handing over the DNC files to Manafort, or to Trump himself, to aid the Republican candidate. Didn’t Hillary Clinton say they would be “celebrating in the Kremlin” if Trump won?