Crowdstrike: Cashing in on a scam
Maybe you saw this recent headline.
The Democratic National Committee famously "rebuffed" a request from the FBI to examine its email server after it was allegedly hacked by Russia during the 2016 election.
You probably remember that, but you've probably forgotten this.
TYT can report that at the same time CrowdStrike was working on behalf of the DNC, the company was also under contract with the FBI for unspecified technical services. According to a US federal government spending database, CrowdStrike’s “period of performance” on behalf of the FBI was between July 2015 and July 2016. CrowdStrike’s findings regarding the DNC server breach — which continue to this day to be cited as authoritative by everyone from former FBI Director James Comey, to NBC anchor Megyn Kelly — were issued in June 2016, when the contract was still active.
OK. Nothing suspicious here. Just a harmless coincidence. NOT!
Do private companies normally withhold access from the FBI to a crime scene, when that company already contracts with the FBI?
What would be their motivation?
Ignoring that for a moment, look at how competent Crowdstrike is since the DNC hack.
The National Republican Congressional Committee was hacked during the 2018 election after hiring CrowdStrike, the cyber-firm that the Democratic National Committee employed that allowed DNC emails to be stolen even after the 2016 hack was detected.The emails of four top NRCC officials were stolen in a major hack that was detected in April — eight months ago, Politico reported Tuesday.
So in the past three years Crowdstrike:
a) detected the DNC server hack, but failed to stop it
b) falsely accused the Russians of hacking Ukrainian artillery
c) failed to prevent the NRCC from being hacked, eventhough that was why they were hired
In other words, Crowdstrike is really bad at their job.
In addition, Crowdstrike is really bad at business too.
CrowdStrike recorded a net loss last year of $140 million on revenue of $249.8 million, and negative free cash flow of roughly $59 million.
So what does a cybersecurity company that is hemorrhaging money and can't protect it's clients do?
It does an IPO.
It just goes to show that "getting it right" is not the same thing as "doing a good job."
If you tell the right people what they want to hear, the money will take care of itself.
Comments
CS neither got it right nor did a good job
CS denied the FBI access to their DNC paid for "analysis" without redaction. Why redact their own document? I cannot conceive of even a stupid reason to do this, let alone a plausible one.
gj, with your trove of sources, why do you think CS redacted their own report--it's all fiction anyway?
Inquiring gators want to know.
I think it's simple
To cover up for their own incompetence.
Actually, CrowdStrike didn't do the redactions.
CrowdStrike only wrote a raw, first-draft story about the alleged Russian hack, which their lawyer told them to write.
Their attorney drew the redactions in CrowdStrike's story, made copies, and sent one to the FBI.
Neither the FBI, nor any other Intelligence service really wanted to see the unredacted "forensics" because they knew that the server logs would show no evidence of a "hack." The NSA would have shared that information. Pretending to believe CrowdStrike gave the IC plausible deniability.
Who was the lawyer that redacted the CrowdStrike story? That was Marc Elias of the DC law firm Perkins Coie. In fact, Marc Elias, recruited to occupy the DNC server when they first heard that the Clinton campaign emails had been leaked. But this wasn't the first time CrowdStrike worked on the DNC server in 2016. Earlier that year, CrowdStrike poured over the DBC server logs looking for evidence that the Bernie Sanders campaign had illegally hacked into the server to steal the Party's voter and donor records.
Marc Elias was also the lawyer for the Clinton Campaign. He's the one who hired Fusion GPS when they finally produced Christopher Steele and his salacious writing sample smearing Donald Trump. Millions of dollars changed hands. Steele's unverified sleaze was the only way left to block Trump and fix the election for Hillary.
Fusion GPS was well aware the the Steele Dossier was a complete fabrication. The company had already spent most of 2016 doing exhaustive opposition research on Donald Trump, paid for by a deep-pockets Republican donor. They turned over every detail and followed every lead and came up empty-handed. They knew Trump either had been thoroughly scrubbed or he was clean. Meanwhile, the FBI was tapping Trump's phones without warrants, while their "foreign assets" were busily entrapping Trump campaign officials on both sides of the pond. And still they came up with nothing that could be used to overthrow the election.
As if all that wasn't filled with conflicts of interest and election shenanegans, Marc Elias was also representing Hillary Clinton in the concurrent investigation into her storage of classified documents on a private server in her home instead of on State Department computers. The Perkins Coie law firm would eventually erase tens of thousands of Clinton's "personal" emails before handing the server over to the FBI. Since 2016, the FBI has acted as the "Praetorian Guard" for the Democratic Party, but they are all hopelessly compromised as they try to keep this crime of the century covered up.
It is telling that they do not have a wider bench /nt
Wonder if they
were worried they would have to explain and testify under oath for or be asked if they could actually prove something.
Good point
Now if only Adam Schiff would subpoena CS and make them testify as to this...and then unicorns will graze on the grass in my back lawn.
oops. duplicate comment
S'ok
I love unicorns.
I think Ed would be better off with a Basilisk, though
Fellow reptile, you know. They maybe could converse in Parseltongue. And perhaps a “Senator Slytherin” can be found who will install said Basilisk in a secret chamber under the Capitol.
</Harry-Potter-refs>
I think this is most of the IT biz right here
It’s all about making the people at the top feel smart for having hired you and assuring them they don’t need to waste their beautiful minds trying to understand what it is you do.
Whoops, you got hacked? Gee, nothing we could have done. More money please!
Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.
Something similar happened with Sony Pictures hack.
Sony Pictures got hacked. They brought in some cyber security. Whoops N.Koreans did it and not the fault in any way of Sony. Focus on North Koreans and forget the contents.
Meanwhile...
Sony’s internal IT people had been warning them for a while about their vulnerability. Naturally there were ignored.
Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.
Funny you should mention Sony
CrowdStrike handled the Sony hack too, throwing the blame onto North Korea.
They never knew what hit them.
It's possible
CrowdStrike is one of the private contractors doing the hacking of both political parties and their candidates during the 2015-2016 election year right up until now. CrowdStrike may also have been one of the private contractors who had access to FISA surveillance data until NSA Director Rogers shut down that illegal access in April of 2016, at which point CrowdStrike began pointing the finger at Russia and producing the impish false flag Guccifer 2.0.
Russiagate is bery bery profitable.
Russiagate will never go away until it is no longer profitable. Outside of blowing up military budgets and an excuse to wage economic warfare to the benefit of American business, it has engendered a host of cyber security firms like New Knowledge and so-called experts on Russian disinformation who can't even read Russian. The worst may be the xenophobia that has infected so many Americans and is the foundation for justifying a war with Russia when the time comes.
Russians killed Seth Rich
Okay they were only involved in creating and fostering one of the most insidious conspiracy theories to arise out of the 2016 election
Who wrote this midsummer blockbuster? None of than Michael Isikoff who was the person that received the Steele dossier that got this whole shebang off and running. It was a few of the kids that went all the way to the Russians killing Seth just to further destroy the country from the inside. Or something nefarious. You know like they have been since as far back as 20003 when they planted some trolls on ToP.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
~Hannah Arendt