Panel warns of cybercrime threats

discovered, she said. But officials were “paralyzed” in part by the fear of seeming partisan: “I think everyone at the time assumed or thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win, so why give the opposition any more ammunition?”

Criminals in Russia and elsewhere had been hacking credit cards and other information for years. But the 2016 intrusions featured not just the hacking of information but the publicizing of it on Wikileaks and elsewhere.

“That kind of put a shiver down everybody’s spine,” said J. Keith Mularski, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent. “‘Now my dirty laundry is going to get aired.’... That’s kind of a new paradigm.”

“This is the new reality,” said former deputy U.S. Attorney General Luke Dembosky. “There is going to be a cyberspace Darwinism period where people who write things in emails are going to be exposed.”

The panelists largely skirted the question of whether Mr. Trump was complicit in the hacks, as some Democrats allege. Mr. Hickton did, however, criticize Mr. Trump for casting doubt on whether Russians were involved.

“It does not help us for the commander in chief to question the attribution” to Russian operatives, he said.

“Hillary Clinton was seen by the Kremlin as a big problem, partly because she was seen as someone behind the Moscow protests” of 2012, said Mr. Soldatov. Leaders also believed that “with Clinton in the White House it would be impossible to get the sanctions lifted” that had been imposed after Mr. Putin’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Mr. Dembosky, who spent two years in Russia, said resentments date to the Cold War, and Russian resentment over having lost it.

“Imagine being one of the two superpowers of the world, having the humility of that crumble [and] being dependent on the West,” he added. “I saw it again and again when I was there: the desire to be treated as an equal.”

The question now is how the United States can respond to further attacks.

“Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, we’re going to see it again,” said Ms. Nakashima. But “the sanctions we’ve put on Russia haven’t seemed to move behavior there.” Nor is it clear whether Mr. Trump, who has said he wants closer relations with Russia, will take further steps.

But Ms. Nakashima had one piece of counsel: “Don’t put anything in your emails that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post.”