Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Mr. Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”

“If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions — which are right, from their point of view — to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia,” he added…

“I can imagine that someone is doing this purposefully — building the chain of attacks so that the territory of Russian Federation appears to be the source of that attack,” Mr. Putin said. “Modern technologies allow to do that kind of thing, it’s rather easy to do.”