DISINFO: Firm behind global IT outage was part of the Russiagate hoax
SUMMARY
CrowdStrike, the firm behind the global IT outage, had a long history of involvement with US intelligence agencies, and played a key role in the ‘Russiagate’ hoax. Crowdstrike was hired by the US Democratic National Committee to investigate the theft of data from its servers in 2016 and concluded that Russia was behind the breach, with its head of cybersecurity consulting wing Shawn Henry testifying to Congress that the company “saw activity that we believed was consistent with activity we’d seen previously and had associated with the Russian government.” However, the full transcript of Henry’s testimony, declassified in 2020, shows that he told lawmakers that his company had “no evidence that [any files] were actually exfiltrated” from the DNC’s servers, and that there was only “circumstantial evidence” and “indicators that that data was exfiltrated.”
RESPONSE
This is an opportunistic attempt to exploit the incident caused by a faulty update by IT and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike -which led to technical problems all over the world and affected millions of people on mid-July 2024- to promote a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative denying Russia’s interference in the US 2016 election.
The allegation is a distortion of Shawn Henry’s testimony, taken from CrowdStrike’s own statement on its investigative role regarding the DNC hacking, in which the company was adamant about the involvement of Russia’s intelligence. Other IT researchers concluded the same at the time.
There is a massive corpus of evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, compiled in the two-volume Mueller report and the five-volume US Senate investigation. Mueller’s investigations led to the criminal indictment of 34 people, 26 of them Russian citizens or entities including the infamous Internet Research Agency. Many other findings by The New York Times and The Washington Post, for which they received the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, were later backed by the evidence presented in court, further investigations or confessions of those involved.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the US never presented evidence of Russia’s involvement in election interference or cyberattacks, that Russiagate was a fraud orchestrated by the West, that US maintains sanctions on Russia even though accusations of interference proved to be unfounded, or that the Mueller report is another proof of how Russia is always falsely accused.