#BUZZFEED DNC SERVER SERIES#

(A spokeswoman for the DNC, Xochitl Hinojosa, said DNC attorneys had called Crowdstrike's president, not the sales desk.)ĭespite his central role, Johnston has never talked with investigators probing Russian interference, let alone with the media. Johnston’s account - told here for the first time, and substantiated in interviews with 15 sources at the FBI, the DNC, and the Defense Department - resolves some of those questions while adding new information about the hack itself.Ī political outsider who got the job essentially at random - the DNC literally called up CrowdStrike’s sales desk - Johnston was the lead investigator who determined the nature and scope of the hack, one he described less as a stealth burglary than as a brazen ransacking. How did the DNC miss the hack? Why did a private security consultant, rather than the FBI, examine its servers? And how did the DNC find Johnston’s firm, CrowdStrike, in the first place? “It was their worst day.”Īlthough the broad outlines of the DNC hack are now well-known, its details have remained mysterious, sparking sharp and persistent questions. Their reaction was “pure shock,” Johnston recalled. Now, working for a private cybersecurity company, he had to brief the DNC - while it was in the middle of a white-knuckle presidential campaign - about what he’d found in the organization’s computer networks. The former Marine Corps captain gave his briefing with unemotional military precision, but what he said was so unnerving that a high-level DNC official curled up in a ball on her conference room chair as if watching a horror movie.Īt 30, Johnston was already an accomplished digital detective who had just left the military’s elite Cyber Command, where he had helped stanch a Russian hack on the US military’s top leadership. The White House has said it will make public as much as it can.One late morning in May 2016, the leaders of the Democratic National Committee huddled around a packed conference table and stared at Robert Johnston.

The intelligence community is reportedly delivering its final, classified assessment of the campaign to President Obama on Thursday, which the White House has said it will provide to lawmakers as soon as possible.īut it remains unknown how much of that document will be declassified and released to the public. That evidence is very strong, outside experts say.Īnd Russia is widely known to conduct the kind of “active measures” the administration has accused it of using in this case. Security experts widely derided a joint Homeland Security-FBI report released last week that purported to give technical indicators linking Russia to the breaches, calling it overly broad and “a mess.”ĬrowdStrike has gone much further in its published forensics analysis. The White House has been under fierce pressure to provide a public account of the intelligence community's assessment. Trump noted in a tweet that Assange has asserted that the emails did not come from Russia, while repeating that anyone could have hacked the DNC. He also appeared to side with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who released emails believed to have been hacked by Russia, over U.S.

#BUZZFEED DNC SERVER SERIES#

In a series of tweets this week, he accused intelligence officials of delaying a briefing until Friday in order to build a case against Russia - an allegation denied by other officials. 6 should be expelled MORE has repeatedly rejected that assessment, characterizing it as an attempt by the Obama administration to undermine his presidency. election, and officials have said they are “100 percent certain” that Russia is the culprit.īut President-elect Donald Trump Donald Trump Youngkin ad features mother who pushed to have 'Beloved' banned from son's curriculum White House rejects latest Trump claim of executive privilege Democrats say GOP lawmakers implicated in Jan. The Obama administration has characterized the hacks as an attempt to interfere in the U.S. The report comes as controversy continues to surround the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was behind the cyberattack on the DNC and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton Super PACs release ad campaign hitting Vance over past comments on Trump I voted for Trump in 2020 - he proved to be the ultimate RINO in 2021 Neera Tanden tapped as White House staff secretary MORE campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal email account.

There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate,” the intelligence official told BuzzFeed. Instead, the official said, the bureau and other agencies have relied on analysis done by the third-party security firm CrowdStrike, which investigated the breach for the DNC.

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