CrowdStrike’s history of hijinks: the cybersecurity firm’s shady connections

A massive IT outage resulting from a faulty code update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software has afflicted infrastructure worldwide. Here are a few cases of the CrowdStrike’s controversial and politicized past:

1️⃣ During the 2016 US election, the Clinton campaign asked none other than CrowdStrike for help investigating the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee – which had revealed embarrassing info about the party’s effort to rig the nomination process in Clinton’s favor.

🌏 CrowdStrike’s probe gave rise to the claim that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and the company provided its “forensic evidence and analysis” to the FBI, starting the ball rolling on the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

🌏 CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry admitted under oath in 2017 that the company had no “concrete evidence” to back up its “Russian hackers” story.

2️⃣ CrowdStrike’s name also came up in the infamous 2019 phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, with Trump asking him to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” with CrowdStrike’s server, which Trump said was in Ukraine.

🌏 The Trump team was convinced CrowdStrike planted evidence on the DNC server to frame Russia while covering up Ukraine’s own efforts to “weaken the Trump bandwagon” during the 2016 election.

🌏 The Trump-Zelensky phone call, in which he also asked Kiev to look into Joe Biden’s role in firing of a prosecutor probing his son’s alleged corruption, sparked the first Trump impeachment.

3️⃣CrowdStrike was one a handful of firms tapped by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2021 to work out a ‘whole-of-nation’ cyber defense plan.

🌏 The same year, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz blamed Russian hackers for the 2020 SolarWinds hack attack on the US Federal Government, but admitted the company had no information of its own “to corroborate that finding.”

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