When Donald Trump attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November, he found a few spare minutes to chat with Russian President Vladimir Putin, during which the topic of Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election was reportedly broached. Putin had denied Russia’s involvement when he appeared on NBC’s Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly over the summer, and he denied it again to Trump, who told reporters afterward, “You can only ask so many times. He said he didn’t meddle . . . every time he sees me he says ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.”

Yet Trump’s own intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia did, in fact, deliberately interfere with the election, and over time outside evidence has piled up: in June, it was revealed that Russian operatives may have hacked election systems in many U.S. states, and Google, Facebook, and Twitter have continued to unearth new evidence that the social-media campaigns launched by Russian hackers were as far-reaching and sophisticated as they were effective. And a new report suggests that the same group of operatives is preparing to launch yet another political attack.

According to the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro Inc., Russian agents have spent the past several months preparing to sabotage the U.S. Senate, and an attack on Senators’ e-mail accounts could be imminent. “They’re still very active—in making preparations at least—to influence public opinion again,” Feike Hacquebord, a security researcher at the firm, told the Associated Press. “They are looking for information they might leak later.” The report suggests that Fancy Bear, the same group of Russian hackers that infiltrated the Democratic National Committee, is behind the new wave of sabotage. Worse, the Trump White House has done almost nothing to address such threats; Trump’s advisers are wary of addressing the matter in the president’s briefings for fear of sending him into a rage, and he has yet to convene a Cabinet-level meeting about how to respond to Russian interference. As a result, per The Atlantic, “American counterintelligence forces sit idle, waiting for a directive to do battle with the Russians that insiders suspect will never come.”

The type of attack described by Trend Micro Inc. jibes with behavior Fancy Bear has displayed in the past; the group hacked the D.N.C. weeks before it began leaking confidential information. Former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s e-mails were released just before the 2016 election, in tranches, for maximum damage. Fancy Bear—which is believed to be linked to Russia’s intelligence agency, the Main Intelligence Directorate—allegedly pulled a similar stunt more recently, when a set of stolen e-mails purportedly belonging to the International Olympic Committee and the United States Olympic Committee officials were suddenly published just after Russia found itself banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics.

For Russia, the Trump administration’s apparent disinterest is a blessing. While the White House sits inert, Russia has begun testing cyber weaponry in places like Ukraine, where operatives have deployed aggressive disinformation campaigns, attempted to rig the Web site of the country’s Central Election Commission, and allegedly taken down the power grid. “They’re testing out red lines, what they can get away with,” Thomas Rid, a professor at King’s College London, told Wired. “You push and see if you’re pushed back. If not, you try the next step.”

The U.S. is vulnerable in other areas, too. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June, Senator John McCain turned his attention to an even more worrisome possibility: “Quietly, the Kremlin has been trying to map the United States telecommunications infrastructure,” he said, describing a series of steps hackers have taken to develop “a cyber weapon that can disrupt the United States power grids and telecommunications infrastructure.” When McCain asked Sessions if the administration had a plan to deal with such an eventuality, Sessions admitted that it did not.

Nor did he offer a satisfactory answer to the question of whether the White House is prepared to handle future election-hacking attempts. When Senator Ben Sasse posed the question, Sessions replied, “Probably not. We’re not. And the matter is so complex that for most of us, we are not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there.”