Firm Hired By DNC Has Ties To Hillary Clinton, A Ukrainian Billionaire And
Google
By Michael Krieger, www.libertyblitzkrieg.com
March 24th, 2017
Above Photo: From libertyblitzkrieg.com
What is CrowdStrike?
As usual, the rabbit hole gets much deeper the more you look.
In yesterday's post, Credibility of Cyber Firm that Claimed Russia Hacked
the DNC Comes Under Serious Question, I examined how CrowdStrike, the
cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to look into its hacking breach, had
been exposed as being completely wrong about a separate attack it claimed
originated from the same group it claimed broke into DNC systems, and
supposedly works for Russia's military intelligence unit, GRU. Here's some
of what we learned:
An influential British think tank and Ukraine's military are disputing a
report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its
claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election.
The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked
into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in
Ukraine's war with Russian-backed separatists.
But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that
CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS
disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine's Ministry of
Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.
The challenges to CrowdStrike's credibility are significant because the firm
was the first to link last year's hacks of Democratic Party computers to
Russian actors, and because CrowdStrike co-founder Dimiti Alperovitch has
trumpeted its Ukraine report as more evidence of Russian election tampering.
Yaroslav Sherstyuk, maker of the Ukrainian military app in question, called
the company's report "delusional" in a Facebook post. CrowdStrike never
contacted him before or after its report was published, he told VOA.
VOA first contacted IISS in February to verify the alleged artillery losses.
Officials there initially were unaware of the CrowdStrike assertions. After
investigating, they determined that CrowdStrike misinterpreted their data
and hadn't reached out beforehand for comment or clarification.
CrowdStrike declined to answer VOA's written questions about the Ukraine
report, and Alperovitch canceled a March 15 interview on the topic. In a
December statement to VOA's Ukrainian Service, spokeswoman Ilina Dimitrova
defended the company's conclusions.
Seems like pretty extraordinary incompetence. Either that, or something else
was potentially at play; namely, a desire to push the narrative that Russia
hacked the DNC, irrespective of the facts.
The whole things gets even more disturbing the more you look.
For example, Counterpunch put out a very important article earlier today on
the topic, adding several crucial nuggets of information.
First there's this:
The investigation methods used to come to the conclusion that the Russian
Government led the hacks of the DNC, Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta,
and the DCCC were further called into question by a recent BuzzFeed report
by Jason Leopold, who has developed a notable reputation from leading
several non-partisan Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for investigative
journalism purposes. On March 15 that the Department of Homeland Security
released just two heavily redacted pages of unclassified information in
response to an FOIA request for definitive evidence of Russian election
interference allegations. Leopold wrote, "what the agency turned over to us
and Ryan Shapiro, a PhD candidate at MIT and a research affiliate at Harvard
University, is truly bizarre: a two-page intelligence assessment of the
incident, dated Aug. 22, 2016, that contains information DHS culled from the
internet. It's all unclassified - yet DHS covered nearly everything in wide
swaths of black ink. Why? Not because it would threaten national security,
but because it would reveal the methods DHS uses to gather intelligence,
methods that may amount to little more than using Google."
That's weird enough, but it gets far stranger. For example:
In lieu of substantive evidence provided to the public that the alleged
hacks which led to Wikileaks releases of DNC and Clinton Campaign Manager
John Podesta's emails were orchestrated by the Russian Government,
CrowdStrike's bias has been cited as undependable in its own assessment, in
addition to its skeptical methods and conclusions. The firm's CTO and
co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council,
a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments that is funded by Ukrainian
billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also happened to donate at least $10 million
to the Clinton Foundation.
In 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton it's Distinguished
International Leadership Award. In 2014, the Atlantic Council hosted one of
several events with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who
took over after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in early
2014, who now lives in exile in Russia.
Recall that the FBI was denied access to the DNC servers by the DNC itself,
and simply agreed to rely on the results provided by CrowdStrike, which as
you can see has ties to all sorts of anti-Russia organizations and
individuals. I find it absolutely remarkable that James Comey head of the
FBI outsourced his job to CrowdStrike.
There remains zero evidence that Russia hacked the DNC. I repeat, there
remains zero evidence that Russia hacked the DNC.
As cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr noted:
Jeffrey Carr called the FBI/Department of Homeland Security Report, the only
alleged evidence released by intelligence officials, released in late
December 2016 a "fatally flawed effort" that provided no evidence to
substantiate the claims that the Russian government conducted the hacks,
though that's what it was purported to do.
Absolutely remarkable, but there's more. As TechCrunch reported back in
2015:
If you need proof that security is a red hot market these days, how about
this morning's announcement that cybersecurity company CrowdStrike landed a
$100 million Series C investment round?
The round was led by Google Capital with Rackspace, which happens to be one
of the company's customers also investing. Existing investors Accel and
Warburg Pincus also participated. Today's investment brings the total
to-date to $156 million.
Why do I find it interesting that Google was a major investor in
CrowdStrike? Well for one, we know that Chairman of Alphabet, Inc. (Google's
parent company), Eric Schmidt, was actively working to help the Hillary
campaign. As I highlighted in the 2015 post,Meet "Groundwork" - Google
Chairman Eric Schmidt's Stealth Startup Working to Make Hillary Clinton
President:
An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a
major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign,
underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.
The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and
technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt-the executive chairman of
Google parent-company Alphabet-to ensure that Clinton has the engineering
talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet
investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are
run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that
allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.
There is also another gap in play: The shrinking distance between Google
and the Democratic Party. Former Google executive Stephanie Hannon is the
Clinton campaign's chief technology officer, and a host of ex-Googlers are
currently employed as high-ranking technical staff at the Obama White House.
Schmidt, for his part, is one of the most powerful donors in the Democratic
Party-and his influence does not stem only from his wealth, estimated by
Forbes at more than $10 billion.
According to campaign finance disclosures, Clinton's campaign is the
Groundwork's only political client. Its employees are mostly back-end
software developers with experience at blue-chip tech firms like Netflix,
Dreamhost, and Google.
Since Democrats seem so obsessed with the saying these days, "where there's
smoke there's fire," and there's plenty of smoke here.
