Russiagate

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike, Inc.

The Source Of Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax

On April 28, 2016, DNC CEO Amy Dacy informed Michael Sussmann, their attorney, that there had been a data breach in the DNC's network. Sussmann contacted Shawn Henry, President and Chief Security Officer of CrowdStrike Services to investigate and provide remediation services.

I believe CrowdStrike to be an unwitting player in the Russiagate conspiracy. My reason for saying this, is that all of the members of the Alfa Bank team were Rodney Joffe associates, and Rodney Joffe, who would be the technical team lead, was recommended by the White House. Joffe is a cybersecurity expert in his own right, having worked for the Justice Department for 12 years. He received an award from the FBI in 2013 for helping crack cybercrimes. To my knowledge, there were no CrowdStrike employees on the forensics team.

What was alleged, was that a server belonging to the Trump Organization had been communicating almost exclusively with a server belonging to the medical company Spectrum Health, and two servers belonging to Alfa Bank, the largest financial institution in Russia.

The researchers were Zetalytic chief data scientist April Lorenzen, Georgia Tech computer scientists Manos Antonakakis and David Dagon. They studied the "traffic logs" that records device connections over the Internet. The logs included a server with the name "mail1.trump-email.com," that had been registered to the Trump Organization.

The group shared their findings with Rodney Joffe, who was an executive at Neustar, an information security firm that provided the DNS logs the researchers used.

None of the researchers were allowed to see the actual contents of the communications between the purported Trump Organization server and the server belonging to Alfa Bank, and none of the researchers was ever allowed to see the data Joffe gave Sussman, who shared them with the FBI.

After that CrowdStrike "shared intelligence with the FBI" on a regular basis, making "contact with them over a hundred times in the course of many months." In congressional testimony, former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged that the FBI "never got direct access to the machines themselves," and instead relied on CrowdStrike, which "shared with us their forensics from their review of the system."

I don't believe CrowdStrike ever saw the data either.