EXCLUSIVE: Cybersecurity experts who were first to conclude that Putin hacked presidential election ABANDON some of their claims against Russia - and refuse to co-operate with Congress
By Alana Goodman For Dailymail.com
05 Apr 2017
EXCERPT:
But now the first expert company to make a link between the DNC hacks and the Kremlin is facing a damaging series of questions over its credibility, DailyMail.com can disclose.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has had to retract portions of a report supporting its allegations of Russian cyberattacks – and is also refusing to address Congress about its findings on Moscow’s election hacking.
CrowdStrike was hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate suspicious network activity last May. In June it declared that the committee had been hacked by the Russian government, starting a firestorm over the campaign.
CrowdStrike, based in Irvine, California, is also the only group that the DNC allowed to directly examine its servers.
Not even the FBI has been granted access to the servers.
U.S. agencies have instead relied on CrowdStrike’s work. There is no other known forensic evidence which has been publicly disclosed to link the Kremlin to the attacks, including in a series of intelligence community statements and reports.
But now questions are emerging about the reliability of the company’s findings.
DailyMail.com can disclose that in March CrowdStrike quietly retracted portions of a December report that had made further Russian hacking claims, after the firm was found to have relied on inaccurate data posted online by a pro-Putin ‘propaganda’ blogger.
The errors prompted both the Ukrainian military and a prominent British think tank to issue public statements disputing CrowdStrike’s data.
The errors, and retraction, surrounded a report in December which claimed that Fancy Bear, the same Russian hackers it said were behind the DNC attacks, were working on behalf of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.
CrowdStrike said it found evidence that Fancy Bear had also hacked into Ukrainian military technology using the same software it used to infiltrate the DNC.
According to the report, the hackers were targeting an app used by Ukrainian soldiers to improve the efficiency of ther 122mm howitzers. The hack resulted in Ukraine losing 80 percent of these weapons in its ongoing low-level battle with Russian forces in the east of the country, the report said.
The report received widespread attention, including from NBC News, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian.
Alperovitch used an interview with the Washington Post to push the report and said: ‘The fact that [these hackers] would be tracking and helping the Russian military kill Ukrainian army personnel in eastern Ukraine and also intervening in the U.S. election is quite chilling.
And Donna Brazile, the interim chairman of the DNC who had been revealed by the leaked emails to have given CNN’s debate questions in advance to Hillary Clinton, and who then lied about it, highlighted the CrowdStrike report on Twitter, saying: ‘Cybersecurity firm finds a link between DNC hack and Ukrainian artillery’
But questions about the report quickly emerged. The Ukrainian military posted a public statement disputing the claim that it was the victim of hackers and denying that it had lost such a large number of howitzers.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies – which CrowdStrike cited as the source of its claim that 80 percent of Ukraine’s howitzers had been taken out, told the VOA that this number was inaccurate. It said the actual percentage of howitzer losses was closer to 15 to 20 percent.
It was soon discovered that CrowdStrike had not obtained this number from IISS directly, and instead relied on post published by a pro-Russian website called The Saker.
The Saker article was written by Russian blogger who goes by the name ‘Colonel Cassad’ and calls himself the ‘bullhorn of totalitarian propaganda,’ according to Voice of America.
Last month CrowdStrike quietly dropped the key claim of an 80 per cent loss, adding a short statement above the initial blogpost to say the report had been ‘amended’ and due to ‘an update’ from the IISS about the howitzer numbers.
Nice find. Thanks.
Question: Why are Republican members of Congress so readily willing to agree with the Russian Conspiracy Theory? Why are are intelligence agencies?