Cyber wars

Obama reportedly directed the NSA to infect Russia with cyber weapons to cause ‘pain’

The Post report, which focuses on Moscow's interference in the 2016 presidential election and the Obama administration's response, said the program was a covert action that would allow the US to retaliate if Russia carries out similar behavior in the future.

"Implants are a term used by the intelligence community for malicious code and backdoors," David Kennedy, a former Marine intelligence specialist and founder of TrustedSec and Binary Defense Systems, told Business Insider. "Essentially [it is] the ability to implant code that goes undetected."

Though the report says Russia would feel "pain" if the infected networks were "disrupted," it's not clear whether the implants were designed to affect infrastructure, similar to how the NSA carried out a successful operation called "Olympic Games" (more commonly referred to as the Stuxnet attack) that set back Iran's nuclear program.