WASHINGTON 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 Committees 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 DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBIs Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justices National Security Division, and U.S. Attorneys Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNCs computer servers, Eric Walker, the DNCs deputy communications director, told BuzzFeed News in an email.
The FBI has instead relied on computer forensics from a third-party tech security company, CrowdStrike, which first determined in May of last year that the DNCs servers had been infiltrated by Russia-linked hackers, the U.S. intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.
CrowdStrike is pretty good. Theres no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate, the intelligence official said, adding they were confident Russia was behind the widespread hacks.
