A CNN article on the recent US Election hacks claims that 


  ...the administration has traced the hack to the specific keyboards -- which featured Cyrillic characters -- that were used to construct the malware code, adding that the equipment leaves "digital fingerprints" and, in the case of the recent hacks, those prints point to the Russian government.


Now to me that sounds like total baloney. You're going to trace a character, which may in some executable code back to a specific keyboard? And you're going to know that its one particular model that is physically in one particular location?

Is this nonsense or is there something I'm missing here? Wouldn't it also be trivial to spoof whatever is the source of this info?

A keyboard is not a typewriter. Keyboards produce scancodes that are interpreted by the software and mapped depending on your layout. When a key press produces a letter on your screen it's nothing more than the character value in its respective charset - keyboards don't leave "digital fingerprints" that could be traced back.

Instead, the author probably meant to say that they found strings or identifiers with Cyrillic letters in the source code. But such traces are easy to fake and wouldn't count as "hard evidence"; even metadata could have been planted.

Here's a similar case: After the Operation Aurora cyber attacks, analysts claimed they had found "Chinese source code" from which they concluded that the attack was led from China:


  HBGary, a security firm, recently released a report in which they claim to have found some significant markers that might help identify the code developer. The firm also said that the code was Chinese language based but could not be specifically tied to any government entity.


Here, the case was actually stronger than the Cyrillic keyboard evidence as researchers could trace back parts of the code to a reference implementation that was only released in a Chinese paper:


  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this source code sample is that it is of Chinese origin, released as part of a Chinese-language paper on optimizing CRC algorithms for use in microcontrollers. [...] This CRC-16 implementation seems to be virtually unknown outside of China 


(Source)
