But the Russian attacks exposed more than the Obama administration’s lack of a playbook for cyber conflict, despite years of ever-escalating, ever-more-ingenious attacks. Russia’s multifaceted, Gerasimov-inspired approach underscored the administration’s failure to anticipate that cyberattacks can be used to undermine more than banks, databases, and electrical grids—they can be used to fray the civic threads that hold together democracy itself.
