Robby Mook can speak with firsthand experience to the damage that cyberattacks can do. | AP Photo Former Clinton campaign manager compares DNC hack to Watergate

Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager wants America to take cybercrimes more seriously, writing in The New York Times that the effects of such crimes can be devastating and likening the hacking attacks against the Democratic National Committee to the Watergate scandal that forced former President Richard Nixon to resign.

Robby Mook, who managed Clinton’s campaign from its launch to its surprising Election Night defeat, can speak with firsthand experience to the damage that cyberattacks can do. The former secretary of state’s presidential campaign was dogged by cyberattacks that have been traced back to the Russian government, hacking efforts that leaking thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee and other prominent party members.


A report released last week by the intelligence community concluded that Russia intentionally sought to damage Clinton’s campaign and aid that of President-elect Donald Trump with its wave of cyberattacks.

“Most of us don’t think of hacking as a crime like breaking and entering. Before the DNC break-in, I thought of hacking as a prank by mischievous tech-savvy people to get revenge,” he wrote. “It wasn’t until I lived through the Russian hackings of Democratic staff members and organizations that I realized how dangerous such an attitude could be.”

Mook noted that he was not “referring to the DNC incident in particular, but about cybercrimes in general” in his Times op-ed. Still, he relied on examples from his own experience leading a campaign plagued by cyberattacks to warn of the consequences that can ensue. Mook said that to ignore cybercrimes, or to take them lightly, is to play “into the hands of foreign aggressors like” Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While Democrats have complained about the influence Russian cyberattacks had on last year’s presidential election, Trump’s team has insisted that there was no impact and that it was Clinton’s inability to connect with voters, not anything divulged by Russian hackers, that cost her the election. The Kremlin, Trump’s team is fond of saying, did not order Clinton not to campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin, typically Democratic states that she narrowly lost.

Trump’s team has also faulted the DNC itself for having lax cybersecurity protocols, a talking point that Mook characterized as blaming the victim. Such a strategy, he said, perpetuates the problem of cybercrimes not being taken as seriously as they should be and “leaves them, and all of us, under threat, because the next attack may be aimed not at a political party, but at the White House or the Pentagon.”

The media, which eagerly reported on the contents of the hacked emails throughout the campaign, has a responsibility too, Mook wrote. Reporters must spend “at least” as much time investigating who or what is behind a particular cyberattack as they do combing through and publishing whatever is released.

“This isn’t a partisan issue, as Republican senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham have already made clear,” Mook wrote. “Mr. Putin and Kim Jong-un of North Korea aren’t registered Democrats or Republicans — they’re anti-American, and they want to hurt democracy itself.”