(Credit: Amazon)
“The Democratic National Committee last month denied a claim made by its former chairwoman, Donna Brazile, about the timeline of the hacking of the committee’s systems, the latest of many contradictions related to the crucial days when thousands of emails were allegedly stolen from the party’s mail server.
In her 2018 book, Brazile wrote that after learning that alleged Russian hackers were inside its systems, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) asked Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm it hired to defend against the hack, to wait one month before kicking out the intruders.
Midway through the month-long wait, the hackers are said to have stolen the 40,000 emails that would eventually be published by Wikileaks.
Brazile’s claim gained renewed significance last month with the release of the final Russia report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The report (pdf) stated that the DNC was aware that the hackers had already stolen files from its systems before the postponement request described by Brazile.
“No one asked anyone to wait,” a senior DNC official told The Epoch Times. “There was a period of time between when we discovered the breach and fully remediated, but that is incredibly fast and everyone was working around the clock to get ready to totally flip our system as fast as possible.”
(…) Brazile did not respond to a request for comment. The former DNC chairwoman wrote in her book that the committee requested the one-month delay in May 2016 because staff needed their computers during the state primaries.
“In May, when CrowdStrike recommended that we take down our system and rebuild it, the DNC told them to wait a month, because the state primaries for the presidential election were still underway, and the party and the staff needed to be at their computers to manage these efforts. For a whole month, CrowdStrike watched Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear operating,” Brazile wrote, referring to the codenames Crowdstrike assigned to the two intruders discovered on the DNC network.
(…) The contradiction between the committee and its chairwoman is among a number of clashing accounts about the emails that were taken from the DNC, the crime at the origin of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the FBI probe of the Trump campaign in May 2017, and Crowdstrike are at odds about whether the DNC’s mail server was hacked and if emails were taken. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/03/2020) (Archive)