FBI Didn’t Request Access to Hacked DNC Servers, Blames DNC for Refusing Access
Instead, they relied on a third party
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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Comments
So when the Obama administration blatantly tried to influence the elections in Israel was that good interference? As always with progressives, ethics are very fluid and situational.
Social [in]justice adventures have a peculiarly Pro-Choice outlook.
The problem here is we are letting the message get lost while we discuss the messengers hair cut. It is all about misdirection.
The story is what was in the messages and what the DNC and Media was doing.
Focus!
Just as we saw in the case of HillaryMail, we’re being bombarded by news stories obviously written by people who wouldn’t know a server from a soup tureen.
Now, why would the DNC have its own servers? That would make about as much sense as setting up its own power grid just to run the paper shredders and the office coffee machine.
The DNC might have a dedicated server, under the illusion of enhanced security. That’s a computer set up as a server, usually owned, maintained, and rented out by a data center. I would expect the FBI to get access to that server by dealing with its owner—the data center, not the DNC.
In other words, we’re still being fed absolute garbage here, just smoke and noise to obfuscate the persistent fact that we’ve been offered no evidence whatsoever that the Russians had anything at all to do with this, or even that it was all a hack, rather than a leak.
A domestic leak remains by far the most likely source of all the embarrassment … which of course the Dems won’t ever admit, as there’s no way they can turn that into a smear against Trump.
Please everyone pay attention to what Tom is saying here. He’s shining a giant searchlight on the real issue, there aren’t going to be physical boxes such as the one in the photo anywhere, the FBI could and should have marched into whatever data hosting facility the Dems were paying for and plugged in their polar-ray dynospheres and found out what was really going on.
In any case, all we need to do is read the leaked stuff, that is the real issue, not where it was and who hacked/leaked it. Really!
It may be true that the Russians hacked the DNC. It may also be true that the source of WikiLeaks’ data was an internal leak. Just because the Russians hacked one or more servers doesn’t mean that they are the source of the data that’s been made public.
However, it’s also possible that the data was hacked by the Russians and then given to a third party, affiliated with, or pretending to be affiliated with, the DNC, who then gave it to WikiLeaks. This may have convinced Assange that the data didn’t come from the Russians (in fact this may have been done to accomplish exactly that). The third party may have believed the Russian source to actually have been an insider. It’s possible the Russian source may have been an insider, a mole inside the DNC – in which case the data would have been leaked (not hacked) by a Russian agent. That third party may have been Seth Rich, who was subsequently killed to prevent him from identifying the Russian mole inside the DNC. (Or a Russian operative who merely posed as a DNC insider – in which case the data had actually been hacked. Either way, the Russians may have been involved, and would have had cause to kill Rich if he had been the intermediary used to convince Assange that the data was leaked, not hacked.)
Still no information about Deep Plunger’s identity. The Washington Post will be right on it. Or scapegoat Russians. But not Nigerians. Or Jews, for that matter. Interesting.
I’m confused… when did “phishing” become “hacking”? If you’re a complete idiot and happen to fall for a phishing scheme, I don’t think you should be able to run around screaming that Russia hacked you.
Phishing gets the password. The password is then used to illegally intrude into an account. In the analog world it’s the equivalent of stealing a car key in order to steal the car. Just because you have the key doesn’t mean you’re authorized to take the car. “Unauthorized access” doesn’t mean you had to break into it, it just means you don’t have permission to be there.
The absurdity is that we are expected to believe a DNC contractor that the DNC, being butt hurt from losing to Trump and embarrassed by being caught cheating in both the primary and general elections, was hacked by the Russian govt. Hardly the most unbiased source here. What it really comes down to is that the only way that we know of the source of the hacking (and, presumably phishing) is indirectly from the organization (DNC) and group (Dems in general) most likely to benefit from it. And, who, coincidentally, appear to have turned down the opportunity to have the, somewhat better qualified, Feds corroborate the Russian govt. as the source.
The new “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” document is still a bit vague on how WikiLeaks got the DNC emails, but it does point the finger at RT, “Russia Today”, who has met with Assange.
I’ll never be President, but if I were, I don’t think I’d slap major international sanctions on a less-than-friendly country without having my people at least examine the evidence directly.
Of course not, only a moronic democrat would do something like that. Obama doesn’t have a good enough golf game to compensate for his other shortcomings so he has to show the world how big a jackass he can be.
Some real jeanious working for the dnc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?_r=0
WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.
His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.
The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.
—————
Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.
“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.
(Gee whiz, maybe call FBI hq and check if they have an agent named Adrian Hawkins maybe?)
Assange claims to still have more material to release. Maybe that’s what is on the server that the DNC doesn’t want the FBI to see. But if Assange is telling the truth, the public (and the FBI) will see it anyway, sooner or later.
Who wrote the headline. Because it looks as if we have two opposing viewpoints.
Either:
1. FBI Didn’t Request Access to Hacked DNC Servers,
or
2. [FBI] Blames DNC for Refusing Access
John Podesta’s server was hacked by the Russians and just about everyone else. Of that there is not question or argument. Of all those who did this hacking, how does anyone know it was Russia that gave Wikileaks the information?
“…how does anyone know it was Russia that gave Wikileaks the information?”
Better yet, why does it matter? ANYONE could have hacked the incompetent boobs system.
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 continue.
This source is lying. One, if the FBI had examined the servers themselves anything criminal they find is grounds for prosecution. Two, CrowdStrike was employed by the DNC, not the FBI. As such they’ll say whatever their employers want them to say about what they found, and they are not required to act on evidence of criminal activity by their employers.