Putin may have done Americans a big favour on cybersecurity

Washington

IT may be wishful thinking, but it's just possible that Vladimir Putin has done us a great favour. He has alerted us to the true threat of cyberwarfare in a way that - again, just possibly - might prompt us to view it as a serious national danger and begin to take effective countermeasures.

Of course, Americans are aware of the hazards of cyberattacks. Every few weeks, it seems, we're confronted with a high-profile hacking that, typically, involves the theft of massive amounts of personal or corporate data. A recent example is Yahoo's disclosure that in 2013 it was hacked and lost data on about one billion users.