Chess legend Garry Kasparov said Thursday that he's "tired of repeating 'I told you so,'" amid reports of Russian election interference in the United States.
Kasparov, now the chair of the Human Rights Foundation, is a notable critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and told CNBC that he's "tired of repeating 'I told you so,'" during an interview at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
"For so many years I've been pointing out Putin's activities in Russia, in neighboring countries, in Europe, predicting that he would go elsewhere if he could see potential benefits," he added.
Both Facebook and Twitter have been rocked by revelations that tens of thousands of posts on their networks were made by misleading accounts linked to Russian group the Internet Research Agency.
"The whole industry of fake news, supported by troll factories, that was the invention of KGB in Russia to deal with Russian opposition to control the internet. Then they extended this practice to Russian speaking neighborhoods in the former Soviet Union. Then they tried it in Europe. Eventually they successfully tried it in the United States."
Kasparov added that "unless we just recognize whether we like it or not, [we're] at war . . . It's not an open war, it's a cyberwar and we have to come up with the comprehensive response, we have to work out a policy of deterrents to make sure that all these abusers . . . will pay unbearable price."