WOLVERINES! Or maybe not.
The Obama Administration was quick to blame Russian agents for “hacking the election”, despite little evidence supporting this conclusion.
There’s no question Democratic National Convention servers were hacked, nor is it a question whether Hillary campaign advisor and longtime Clintonite John Podesta’s email was hacked. This much we know for certain. See Wikileaks.
President Obama was confident Russians were to blame for the hacks, which Democrats have also suggested swayed the outcome of the presidential election.
Wednesday, Buzzfeed reported the FBI didn’t even bother to check out the hacked servers themselves. Instead, they relied on a third party — CrowdStrike.
Six months after the FBI first said it was investigating the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system, one US intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.“The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers,” Eric Walker, the DNC’s deputy communications director, told BuzzFeed News in an email.The FBI has instead relied on computer forensics from a third-party tech security company, CrowdStrike, which first determined in March of last year that the DNC’s servers had been infiltrated by Russia-linked hackers, the U.S. intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.“CrowdStrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate,” the intelligence official said, adding they were confident Russia was behind the widespread hacks.
“Pretty good.”
BuzzFeed News spoke to three cybersecurity companies who have worked on major breaches in the last 15 months, who said that it was “par for the course” for the FBI to do their own forensic research into the hacks. None wanted to comment on the record on another cybersecurity company’s work, or the work being done by a national security agency.
The FBI swatted back, blaming the DNC for refusing to hand over their servers for inspection:
“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated. This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information,” a senior law enforcement official told BuzzFeed News in a statement. “These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.”The DNC said the FBI had never asked for access to their hacked servers, BuzzFeed News reported on Wednesday.A DNC source familiar with the investigation tried to downplay that report on Thursday, hours before the FBI statement was issued. The fact that the FBI didn’t have direct access to the servers was not “significant,” the source said.“I just don’t think that that’s really material or an important thing,” the source continued. “They had what they needed. There are always haters out here.”The DNC source also brushed off the idea that it was the DNC that refused to let FBI access the server. When BuzzFeed News attempted to reach the official after the FBI statement came out, he declined to comment.
Supposing it’s true that the DNC refused to cooperate, we have to wonder why and then question what they may be hiding from intelligence scrutiny.
Regardless, President Obama is only tempting Cold War Part 2, so why would anyone bother to double check the facts before making accusations?
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