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in the actual mechanics of the tool the researchers had uncovered. The malware seemed designed not as a onetime-use grenade but as a reusable and adaptable weapons system.

No one would build such a unique piece of malicious software and spend a year burrowing into a victim’s network to plant it, only to inflict a one-off, one-hour blackout. “This is a piece of malware that looks like it’s built to target other sites,” Lee told me. “Nothing about this attack looks like it’s singular. The way it’s built and designed and run makes it look like it was meant to be used multiple times. And not just in Ukraine.”

The same week that Lee and his Dragos researchers published their report on the Crash Override malware, Lee was invited to brief members of the White House’s National Security Council. Sitting in a large conference room with representatives of the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, CIA, and NSA, he explained how the discovery of this code represented a unique, scalable, and versatile threat to power grids around the world.

At first, Lee thought the Trump administration might be preparing to launch the sort of response to the second Ukraine blackout that had been so noticeably absent from the first. “Everyone got on the same page. No one was confused. Everyone knew it was important,” Lee said.

But as the days and weeks after the briefing passed, Lee heard nothing more. Finally, when he got through to a White House staffer, he was told that the information he’d presented about Russian grid malware had made its way to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who’d passed on a snippet to President Trump. And the answer, as Lee tells it, had been “We’re not interested in talking about that.”

Trump, whose understanding of computers and digital security was notoriously thin, might have ignored the news simply because he tuned out all things “cyber.” But as Lee describes it, the message passed to him, filtered through several layers from the president, had been that the Crash Override news was “bad timing” and “too political.” In other words, as the controversy around Russia’s role