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And we are now on the brink of war. A cyber-war could disrupt online communications right before the election.

As Cboldt said on the other thread: "The story is pure propaganda targeted at the US population. There won't be any "ramped up" US cyber attack. Clandestine network activity will continue as usual, and both sides know it."

I think Cboldt is correct. The only "evidence" I have seen about Russian attacks is that the DNC brought in a former Russian (now naturalized American) to "prove" that the Russians were hacking into the DNC servers. You can read his stuff here: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/:

There is rarely a dull day at CrowdStrike where we are not detecting or responding to a breach at a company somewhere around the globe. In all of these cases, we operate under strict confidentiality rules with our customers and cannot reveal publicly any information about these attacks. But on rare occasions, a customer decides to go public with information about their incident and give us permission to share our knowledge of the adversary tradecraft with the broader community and help protect even those who do not happen to be our customers. This story is about one of those cases.

CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR. We’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well. In fact, our team considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis. Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft – both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.

The bold is mine of course. Not the most subtle of propaganda, but there it is: the origin of all the Russian hacking stories.

-- The only "evidence" I have seen about Russian attacks is that the DNC brought in a former Russian (now naturalized American) to "prove" that the Russians were hacking into the DNC servers. --

Just so. No evidence has been produced. Zero. Just a conclusion that is supposedly "correct" because an unnamed "expert" rendered it. Pure bullshit all around. There is no evidence, just a wild claim. But wild claims repeated by a lying press somehow become true.

No shortage of idiots out there who do lap it up as correct.