In the cyber break-in stakes, the champion is Russia

RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE has not had a great year. After the botched attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal, an ex-spy living in Britain, scores of its officers were booted out of Western embassies. Hundreds more were exposed by sloppy tradecraft, such as the use of sequentially numbered passports. Yet there is at least some cheer for Russia’s cyber-spies: they have topped a rogue’s table of hacking prowess.CrowdStrike, an American cyber-security company, published its annual report last month. For the first time, this included a ranking of the West’s cyber-foes. It did so by looking not at the sophistication of their tools (which can be bought from others) but instead at “breakout time”.