While recent articles discussing the Global Threat Report by CrowdStrike have mainly paid attention to the report’s ranking of how long state-backed hackers from various countries take to move laterally across the network of a compromised organization (spoiler alert: Russian hackers were fastest), certain less appreciated findings of the research actually have major implications for the US cyber strategy of deterring state actors through indictments.

The researchers claim that “in spite of some impressive indictments against several named nation-state actors — their activities show no signs of diminishing.” In fact, even though “several nation-states [publicly] gave lip-service to curbing their clandestine cyber activities”, they actually “doubled down on their cyber espionage operations — combining those efforts with further forays into destructive attacks and financially motivated fraud.” The report concludes that generally speaking, law enforcement operations have so far not succeeded in stopping or limiting state-backed offensive cyber campaigns.

Read more: New report questions effectiveness of cyber indictments