Putin: Russia does not engage in hacker attacks, “patriotic” hackers can hack mail

President Vladimir Putin said that Russia does not engage in hacking activities and does not support hackers, reports . RBC

“We never do this at the state level, that’s what’s most important,” the president said at a meeting with heads of international agencies at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

He added that hackers cannot radically influence the course of an election campaign in another state.

“Nothing will affect the consciousness of voters, the consciousness of the people, no information will affect the final results, the final results,” the president emphasized.

As writes , Putin compared hackers to artists. the BBC Russian service

“Because hackers are free people, like artists, they are in a good mood, they got up in the morning and paint pictures. The same goes for hackers: they woke up today, read that something is happening there in interstate relations, if they are patriotic, they begin to make their contribution, as they consider correct, in the fight against those who speak badly about Russia. Theoretically, this is possible,” he said.

In early January, the US Intelligence Community named Russian President Vladimir Putin responsible for interfering in the US elections. However, the intelligence report did not conclude whether Russia influenced the outcome of the 2016 elections.

During the pre-election campaign in the United States, the servers of the Democratic National Committee were hacked. After this, the WikiLeaks portal published the correspondence of John Podesta, head of the campaign headquarters of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump's rival. Clinton and US authorities claimed that Russian intelligence agencies were involved in the hack.

During the 2017 French presidential election, candidate Emmanuel Macron's email account was hacked. In his published email, there were signs that Russian hackers were involved in the hack: the metadata of the files mentioned a man named Georgiy Petrovich Roshka. A person with the same name was mentioned as an employee of the Eureka company. WikiLeaks , which published the correspondence, suggested that the mention of a Russian IT specialist was an attempt to specifically indicate Russian involvement.