Russians accused of trying to ‘interfere’ with US election

If you’ve been following the US election, you’ve seen countless accusations thrown around between the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Some of them are wild, some of them are based on facts.

But now another accusation as come out – and this time it’s country vs country.

US officials are now accusing the Russian government of cyber attacks “intended to interfere with the US election process.”

You might be wondering how they came to that conclusion?

Well, US officials are pointing to recent hacked emails appearing on Wikileaks and other websites.

They say the email hacks appearing on those sites were “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts”.

Although many analysts have already said the hacks looked like they were coming from Russia, this is the first time the US has officially accused Putin’s government.

“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement.

According to the statement, US intelligence officials were confident that Russian government officials “directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations”.

“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process,” the statement said.

“Such activity is not new to Moscow – the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.”

But, officials have stopped short at blaming Russia for the recent cyber-attacks on state election databases.

“Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company,” the statement said.

“However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian government.”

What do you think? Could Russia really be responsible for the hacks?