U.S. President Donald Trump has attracted ridicule for his solution to computer hacking: Write stuff down and send it by courier. Actually, given what we saw in 2016, that might not be such a bad idea.
Some of the biggest security breaches in history came to light in the past year. Hackers compromised 68 million accounts at Dropbox, 100 million at LinkedIn, 400 million at AdultFriendFinder, 427 million at Myspace, and more than a billion at Yahoo. And then there were the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the email server of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
People tend to size up assailants by the amount of damage they do: The bigger the data breach, the bigger the attacker. Targets embarrassed by hacks encourage this perception. Yahoo attributed its intrusion to a state-sponsored actor. U.S. intelligence officials insist that "only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized" a hack significant enough to influence the outcome of the presidential election.