The FBI Never Asked For Access To Hacked Computer Servers

a reply to: loam

Senators ask DHS DOJ

By Sean Lyngaas Dec 04, 2015
The senators want to know how many ransomware variants Justice and DHS are tracking and how closely they are working together to do so.

The economics of ransomware seem to favor the attacker. To boost profits, operators of ransomware are hiring and funding their own development teams to fashion new variants of malware, according to Cisco's latest Midyear Security Report. Almost all ransomware is multi-vector, meaning multiple pieces of malware may be involved in the attack, the report states. Cleaning up the malware can therefore be difficult.

Federal officials have taken notice. In June 2014, Justice announced that it had disrupted a form of ransomware known as CryptoLocker, which by one estimate had extracted $27 million from victims in its first two months of existence. Yet within a month of that takedown, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center identified an imitation ransomware known as CryptoWall, according to the senators' letter. From April 2014 to June 2015, CryptoWall squeezed victims for $18 million in ransom, according to the FBI.

I'll have to come back tomorrow, it's my bedtime.

The FBI requested acces but were repeatedly denied.

That's right, the DNC deliberately obstructed and impeded this alleged national security investigation.

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," a senior law enforcement official told CNN. "This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier."

www.cnn.com...

Unfortunately fake-news-CNN is currently the only source for this but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Good question, President Trump.


Good question.

The Democratic National Committee would not allow the FBI to study or see its computer info after it was supposedly hacked by Russia......

So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?
4:40 PM - 5 Jan 2017

mobile.twitter.com...

originally posted by: Diisenchanted
a reply to: xuenchen

I read that story and I believe that crowdstrike was the consulting firm.

Hackers affiliated with the Russian government have been tapping into the files of the Democratic National Committee for nearly a year, targeting in particular the party’s opposition research about Donald Trump, officials say.

DNC officials said they did not believe any sensitive donor information was compromised. Instead, the hackers took aim at the thousands of pages of research DNC staffers compiled to use in attacking Trump during the presidential race.

In some respects, the files are a puzzling target: The most damning information was gathered for the express purpose of being made public. But security experts said that extensive files on a potential U.S. president would be the sort of information that foreign spy agencies would devote considerable resources to obtain.

“Donald Trump is probably not someone the foreign intelligence services had too much of a dossier on, unlike Clinton,” who has been in public life for decades, said Paulo Shakarian, a cybersecurity scholar at Arizona State University. “What better database to get for someone who wants to know his dirty secrets?”

The above posts are form a thread I authored earlier.

It shows that crowdstrike targeted information that the Clinton campaign had on Donald Trump.

It also shows that the hack had been going on for a year before it was stopped.

It also shows that if the hack was to try to help trump then the would have had to have known that he was going to win the Republican nomination about the same time he announced he was running.

The link where this information came from is here.link

The ATS story where I posted this information is here.link

I think the hacking was general intelligence gathering. It would not surprise me if Russia also successfully hacked the RNC servers. The U.S. intelligence communities do the same thing to the Russians.

The general goal is to have inside information on whoever ends up in charge, to understand their motives, to know their secrets, and to gain leverage over them.

However, once Russia realized it was a choice between Trump and Hillary, leaking the DNC info to wiki-leaks became the preferred strategy to avoid a U.S. President clearly aligned against their interests.

And contrary to the conspiratorial BS in this thread, the fact that an independent firm gathered the logfiles and did the analysis doesn't render it moot.

a reply to: Greggers

But what if that "independent" firm was paid to get specific results?

You know right.

originally posted by: xuenchen
a reply to: Greggers

But what if that "independent" firm was paid to get specific results?

You know right.

So, skunkworks then?

I realize this is a conspiracy Website, but there's a trend here.

When the right thought the FBI and CIA directly analyzed the server, they accused the FBI and CIA of making it up.

When they found out an independent firm analyzed the server, they accused the independent firm of making it up.

I would assume at this point the U.S. intelligence agencies have reviewed the findings in detail.

a reply to: Greggers

Well it's not like they've really been allowed to directly examine the actual evidence in order to produce their report have they? And yet we are being told to treat it as if they had.

Last I checked, American jurisprudence does not place as high an emphasis or importance on testimony as it does on hard evidence.

And when the testimony is based on the word of liars (DNC), then it's truly suspect.

originally posted by: Greggers

originally posted by: xuenchen
a reply to: Greggers

But what if that "independent" firm was paid to get specific results?

You know right.

So, skunkworks then?

I realize this is a conspiracy Website, but there's a trend here.

When the right thought the FBI and CIA directly analyzed the server, they accused the FBI and CIA of making it up.

When they found out an independent firm analyzed the server, they accused the independent firm of making it up.

I would assume at this point the U.S. intelligence agencies have reviewed the findings in detail.

An independent firm, CrowdStrike, whose top executive co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is, himself, a Russian Expat
The Russian Expat Leading the Fight to Protect America

An independent firm whose co-founder himself enjoys role playing in the realm of spy craft.
Source: Esquire

To better understand his adversaries, Alperovitch posed as a Russian gangster on spam discussion forums, an experience he wrote up in a series of reports. One day he returned from lunch to a voice mail telling him to call the FBI immediately. He was terrified. "I was not a citizen yet," he told me.

An independent firm, CrowdStrike, whose top executive co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch likewise, has ties to Clinton that go back to 2010 when he was called to Washington to vet a single paragraph for Clinton? Source: Esquire

Alperovitch's first big break in cyberdefense came in 2010, while he was at McAfee. The head of cybersecurity at Google told Alperovitch that Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected more than a dozen of McAfee's clients. Three days after his discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington. He'd been asked to vet a paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. She'd decided, for the first time, to call out another country for a cyberattack. "In an interconnected world," she said, "an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all."

An independent firm whose top executive co-founder has been pushing the current Administration to make public, prior hacks. But that darn administration just wasn't working fast enough.

Alperovitch believed that the government, paralyzed by bureaucracy and politics, was still moving too slowly.

An independent firm, CrowdStrike, whose top executive co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch just happens to know DoHS chief cyber security official Phyllis Schneck, herself a hacker since her teen years:

Alperovitch studied computer science at Georgia Tech and went on to work at an antispam software firm. There he met a striking dark-haired computer geek named Phyllis Schneck. As a teenager, Schneck once showed her father that she could hack into the company where he worked as an engineer. Appalled, Dr. Schneck made his daughter promise never to do something like that again.

The same federal agency, DoHS whose IP addresses were identified from the attempted hack of the Georgia Election Bureau.

Georgia accuses US of trying to hack its election systems

WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. state of Georgia is accusing the Homeland Security Department of apparently trying to hack its election systems. Georgia Secretary of State Brian P. Kemp said in a letter Thursday a computer traced back to the agency in Washington tried unsuccessfully to penetrate the state office’s firewall one week after the presidential election. Kemp sought details, including who might have authorized the activity and whether other states might have been scanned without authorization.

An independent firm whose top executive co-founder is now regularly consulted on security policy.
Esquire

In the five years since Alperovitch cofounded CrowdStrike, he and his company have played a critical role in the development of America's cyberdefense policy.

(^^ Yeah, up there. ^^ And how's that been working for the U.S.???)

An independent firm whose co-founder president Shawn Henry, retired in 2012 from the FBI after serving as executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.

Russian Expat co-founds company with retired FBI executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. Ties to Clinton that go back six years. Expat Russian, who enjoys spy craft, wants the feds to follow his recommendations for cyber security defense. Feds moving too slowly. But no longer. Mission Accomplished! Now 17 federal agencies signed on to same narrative. Well done.

All these fiefdoms, so much power.

Aside, if the DNC hack was about opposition research on Trump, then what's the story on the DNC Email dump that WL published 22 July 2016?

The obama admin using subcontracted out programmers couldn't make a website lol for millions of dollars. Does anyone remember the obamacare website? How much of a disaster it was it was?

Heres an article on it
www.theatlantic.com...

Here is how much the website cost taxpayers
www.bloomberg.com...

This is what happens when the dnc picks its own people to do a project. And your going to tell us that a third party IT consulting firm instead of the fbi conducted the report. I would suggest people question how much it cost the dnc to find said evidence of russian hacking and if it exceeds the amount of a normal data forensics investigation the we need to question the reports findings.

a reply to: EightAhoy

Sir, this is one of best posts I ever read. Thank you.

I'm guessing that there's big money in government contracts at risk for CrowdStrike in how this all plays out. Just sayin...

a reply to: xuenchen

I can just about understand an awful corporate whore of a government like that of the US, employing a consultant from a company to assist with forensic computer analysis, but for the ONLY examination of the computer system concerned, to have been performed entirely by such a company sounds utterly absurd. Now, my preference would be for only government employees to be involved at any stage of the forensic examination, because I believe that the motivations of government employees are less mercenary in ideal circumstances, than the motivations of money making organisations. However, again, for the ENTIRE process to be given over to a private company seems highly shady.

When a person is shot dead, I do not expect analysts from the ballistics development program at Walther or Colt to be involved in the investigation into the death. I expect government employees to be the ones to do that work.

originally posted by: EightAhoy

originally posted by: Greggers

originally posted by: xuenchen
a reply to: Greggers

But what if that "independent" firm was paid to get specific results?

You know right.

So, skunkworks then?

I realize this is a conspiracy Website, but there's a trend here.

When the right thought the FBI and CIA directly analyzed the server, they accused the FBI and CIA of making it up.

When they found out an independent firm analyzed the server, they accused the independent firm of making it up.

I would assume at this point the U.S. intelligence agencies have reviewed the findings in detail.

An independent firm, CrowdStrike, whose top executive co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is, himself, a Russian Expat
The Russian Expat Leading the Fight to Protect America

An independent firm whose co-founder himself enjoys role playing in the realm of spy craft.
Source: Esquire

To better understand his adversaries, Alperovitch posed as a Russian gangster on spam discussion forums, an experience he wrote up in a series of reports. One day he returned from lunch to a voice mail telling him to call the FBI immediately. He was terrified. "I was not a citizen yet," he told me.

An independent firm, CrowdStrike, whose top executive co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch likewise, has ties to Clinton that go back to 2010 when he was called to Washington to vet a single paragraph for Clinton? Source: Esquire

Alperovitch's first big break in cyberdefense came in 2010, while he was at McAfee. The head of cybersecurity at Google told Alperovitch that Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected more than a dozen of McAfee's clients. Three days after his discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington. He'd been asked to vet a paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. She'd decided, for the first time, to call out another country for a cyberattack. "In an interconnected world," she said, "an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all."

An independent firm whose top executive co-founder has been pushing the current Administration to make public, prior hacks. But that darn administration just wasn't working fast enough.

Alperovitch believed that the government, paralyzed by bureaucracy and politics, was still moving too slowly.

An independent firm, CrowdStrike, whose top executive co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch just happens to know DoHS chief cyber security official Phyllis Schneck, herself a hacker since her teen years:

Alperovitch studied computer science at Georgia Tech and went on to work at an antispam software firm. There he met a striking dark-haired computer geek named Phyllis Schneck. As a teenager, Schneck once showed her father that she could hack into the company where he worked as an engineer. Appalled, Dr. Schneck made his daughter promise never to do something like that again.

The same federal agency, DoHS whose IP addresses were identified from the attempted hack of the Georgia Election Bureau.

Georgia accuses US of trying to hack its election systems

WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. state of Georgia is accusing the Homeland Security Department of apparently trying to hack its election systems. Georgia Secretary of State Brian P. Kemp said in a letter Thursday a computer traced back to the agency in Washington tried unsuccessfully to penetrate the state office’s firewall one week after the presidential election. Kemp sought details, including who might have authorized the activity and whether other states might have been scanned without authorization.

An independent firm whose top executive co-founder is now regularly consulted on security policy.
Esquire

In the five years since Alperovitch cofounded CrowdStrike, he and his company have played a critical role in the development of America's cyberdefense policy.

(^^ Yeah, up there. ^^ And how's that been working for the U.S.???)

An independent firm whose co-founder president Shawn Henry, retired in 2012 from the FBI after serving as executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.

Russian Expat co-founds company with retired FBI executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. Ties to Clinton that go back six years. Expat Russian, who enjoys spy craft, wants the feds to follow his recommendations for cyber security defense. Feds moving too slowly. But no longer. Mission Accomplished! Now 17 federal agencies signed on to same narrative. Well done.

All these fiefdoms, so much power.

Aside, if the DNC hack was about opposition research on Trump, then what's the story on the DNC Email dump that WL published 22 July 2016?

Yeah, that independent firm. None of that even implies he's lying.

originally posted by: Middleoftheroad

originally posted by: xuenchen
So this story is saying the FBI never *actually* examined the Democrat National Committee computer system first hand !!

Looks like they relied on a consulting company paid for by the DNC itself.

Well maybe the DNC was setting up their excuses for failure ahead of time.

Russia did it anyway !!


The FBI Never Asked For Access To Hacked Computer Servers

The Democratic National Committee tells BuzzFeed News that the bureau “never requested access” to the servers the White House and intelligence community say were hacked by Russia.

The FBI did not examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee before issuing a report attributing the sweeping cyberintrusion to Russia-backed hackers, BuzzFeed News has learned.

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 immaturity of the DNC and their supporters is ridiculous. Everyone with even the smallest bit of common sense has been asking for proof since this whole story broke. Especially due to the MSM being caught in lie after lie throughout the election. Instead they flood the news with opinionated propaganda and put all Americans at risk by posturing against another superpower over hurt feelings. I havenI haven't seen a group of sore losers this bad since...well...forever.'t seen a group of sore losers this bad since...well...forever.

And hopefully we never will again. If the DNC has their way about it , "Stick a fork in em" "Yep , they all done" D U N -done
Peace

a reply to: xuenchen


This is getting stupid.


The FBI sucks at Cyber...


NSA are the ones with Cyber teams and they had everything already...


Crowdstrike did the analysis and reported findings to NSA and FBI..


Crowdstrike was called in to help the DNC...They ALSO were and still even now...run Cyber security for Trump's campaign..
They also are a team of EXCEPTIONAL cyber white-hat hackers that are both private AND consult for US Government.


Crowdstrike are white-hat hackers that work for Trump, DNC and NSA depending on contract. I even know a couple of the hacker/consultants there and have seen them "go dark" for weeks at a time...described to me by one contact as showing up in a location in Virginia where everyone gives up their cell phone and is thoroughly searched and then spends a week or two with 20-50 other hackers in a warehouse type facility with PCs, cots to sleep on etc. in blacked out from communicating with the outside world for security purposes...these guys can earn 100k in a few weeks.
They are that good. The US gov rounds up the best US white-hat (sometimes gray-hat) hackers for sprint like assignments a couple times a year. It's just simply a known thing in the hacking community in the USA.


There is not some "wall" between crowdstrike and NSA...the best hackers are private and work for Crowdstrike and NSA on assignment.


The FBI asking for access is silly when Crowdstrike and NSA had the Entire Hack mapped from both ends...now down to audio calls by senior Russian intelligence officials discussing the operation and congratulating eachother on its success.


The evidence is now overwhelming and damning...


So much so that former CIA Director Woolsey resigned from the Trump Transition team yesterday and nobody in congress is denying the Russian hack anymore.

DP

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: xuenchen

I can just about understand an awful corporate whore of a government like that of the US, employing a consultant from a company to assist with forensic computer analysis, but for the ONLY examination of the computer system concerned, to have been performed entirely by such a company sounds utterly absurd. Now, my preference would be for only government employees to be involved at any stage of the forensic examination, because I believe that the motivations of government employees are less mercenary in ideal circumstances, than the motivations of money making organisations. However, again, for the ENTIRE process to be given over to a private company seems highly shady.

AGAIN the BEST cyber security the gov have are technically "private"...For the best in the USA...they can either collect a gov. salary or consult for Visa, Sony, Paypal and the NSA all in one year and make 1.5M - 3M in one year...An average cyber security hacker in the private sector makes 400k...that average...One of my businesses is a firm that has had to recruit these guys before. I have talked to a bunch of them.

The NSA has a few good experts in-house...but they can't afford to pay 50-100 of them a couple million a year a piece, so they vet them as if they are NSA employees, but allow them to consult as needed...where they can also consult for private companies (mostly finance, CC companies and digital transactions...but yes...they were called in by the Trump and Clinton campaigns).

Either way...from what I have read about what Congress got in evidence this past week...it is soup to nuts damning. Trump and Trumpites can muddy the waters with nonsense, but it just makes Trump look like a lunatic liar...more so as he is getting a full classified briefing on the matter today and next week a redacted report will be released to the public.

a reply to: Indigo5

If the US government can afford illegal wars and everything that comes with them, then they CAN afford to employ fifty or a hundred of these super brains. Hell, if they can afford that nonsense, they could afford to replace their entire cyber security infrastructure with them.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: Indigo5

If the US government can afford illegal wars and everything that comes with them, then they CAN afford to employ fifty or a hundred of these super brains. Hell, if they can afford that nonsense, they could afford to replace their entire cyber security infrastructure with them.

You'd like to think so...But White-Hat Hackers (and grey hat) make ridiculous amounts in the free market.
There are literally something like 50 guys that everyone in the cyber-security world knows and calls when things go bad.
And literally...there have been times when Visa, MasterCard or other multi-billion dollar companies have had breaches and no one can reach any of those guys...and then a couple weeks later everyone returns the calls on the same day and it is understood that it was an NSA project responding to something.

So those 20 or 30 something year old geniuses get to make millions consulting and working on fascinating new challenges all the time or they can work for one employer on the same general challenges (NSA) ...it pays less and is less exciting. Plus there is a value to have them out in the wild learning about new and varied hacks and opponents on a regular basis. They get to know the personal style and methodologies of other hacking teams and individuals and can identify and head off their work through near instinct.

The guys at crowdstrike are not some web company...They work for NSA, DNC and Trump simultaneously...same guys..

That's why to the cyber security community...this spin looks ridiculous...The same guys that fingered Russia and mapped it out in great detail...work closely with NSA and have been and still do work for Trrump..

Trump campaign has hired security firm CrowdStrike,

www.reuters.com...

I can offer a gazillion other links..

If Trump thinks Crowdstrike is a Dem conspiracy firm faking evidence...why does he have them owning his cyber security with full, unbridled access?

Some really stupid BS people are spinning.

The FBI asking for access is silly when Crowdstrike and NSA had the Entire Hack mapped from both ends...now down to audio calls by senior Russian intelligence officials discussing the operation and congratulating eachother on its success.

Mapped from both ends? Complete with audio? Are you assuming this or is there a source?



While I agree there could be more evidence than what I read in the CrowdStrike report, the report itself was far from damning.