Trump pledges "aggressive action" to combat cyber hacking

PanARMENIAN.Net - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will take "aggressive action" against cyber hacking in the early days of his government, Vice President-elect Mike Pence told reporters in New York on Friday, January 6, Raw Story reports.

In a brief statement he delivered outside Trump Tower, Pence commented on a report by U.S. intelligence agencies that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian government to use hacking to try to help Trump win the November 8 election.

Trump was briefed on the contents of the report earlier on Friday in what Pence called “a constructive and respectful dialogue.”

“The president-elect has made it very clear that we are going to take aggressive action in the early days of our administration to combat cyber attacks and protect the American people from this type of intrusion in the future,” Pence said.

Trump asserted that hacking did not sway the U.S. election, after a briefing on an intelligence report that blamed Russia's Vladimir Putin for a cyber campaign to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

While the president-elect held fast to his rejection of the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the election, he accepted the possibility that Moscow was involved in hacking US targets including the Democratic National Committee.

After meeting four top intelligence chiefs, Trump acknowledged that cyber attacks by Russia, China and other countries threaten U.S. institutions, political parties and businesses.

But he offered no direct acceptance of the intelligence chiefs' conclusion that Moscow staged an unprecedented attempt to influence the 2016 White House race by hacking and leaking documents that, they said in a new report, also aimed to boost Trump's campaign.