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CrowdStrike: How the Guardian Delivers its Fake News

Tutisicecream

The emerging CrowdStrike “Russian Hack Attack” revelations show the most recent example of the Guardian along with the rest of the WMSM parroting the same fake news story


As the Guardian bemoans that the post truth era is upon us, we find another example of the fake news they faithfully report to their readers in the emerging revelations of CrowdStrike. First revealed by Michael Sainato this week in Counterpunch Thursday 23 March 2017 growing interest is developing in this story, but don’t expect too much reporting in the Guardian or other MSM outlets. Why? Well put simply as the Guardian froths over the Putin Paradox, the Guardian’s very real Propaganda Paradox is proving a more salient line of questioning among independent minded observers.
CrowdStrike has been widely reported in the WMSM and used as a basis to push the fake narrative of “Russia Hacked the US elections”. The story emerging so far is that an influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cyber security firm CrowdStrike has used to back its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election. As covered by Michael Krieger at Liberty Blitzkrieg:

The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists. But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.
In lieu of substantive evidence provided to the public that the alleged hacks which led to Wikileaks releases of DNC and Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta’s emails were orchestrated by the Russian Government, CrowdStrike’s bias has been cited as undependable in its own assessment, in addition to its sceptical methods and conclusions. The firm’s CTO and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. You may not be surprised to learn that in 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton it’s Distinguished International Leadership Award. In 2014, the Atlantic Council hosted one of several events with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who took over after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in early 2014, who now lives in exile in Russia.

Yatsenyuk having been installed by the US and having to resign because of his unpopularity now resides in California close by Google’s HQ in Mountain View. Why mention Google? Well coincidentally in 2015 CrowdStrike landed a $100 million Series C US government investment round. The round was led by Google Capital with Rackspace, which happens to be one of the company’s customers also investing. Existing investors Accel and Warburg Pincus also participated. Today’s investment brings the total funding to-date in CrowdStrike to $156 million. Big Money.
The fact CrowdStrike is now being regarded as unreliable in its methods and conclusions, you might think the Guardian, which used the report as a vehicle to promote anti-Russian and anti-Putin rhetoric and blatant propaganda, might be reporting this. Well don’t hold your breath. As you can see the links to the Clinton Foundation and the use of CrowdStrike’s conclusions to promote a false narrative would require a gigantic climb down. This is not going to happen as the false narrative is too well entrenched.
Some examples of the Guardian’s Russo-phobic “Russian Hack Attacks” using the CrowdStrike fake report as a basis:

Group allegedly behind DNC hack targeted Ukraine, report finds
CrowdStrike says malware implant was used to track movements of artillery units, adding to suspicions Russia is involved

US believes Russian hackers are behind Democratic National Committee leak
Growing consensus within Obama administration is that Russians infiltrated DNC but there is less certainty that Vladimir Putin’s government is responsible

US intelligence report: Vladimir Putin ‘ordered’ operation to get Trump elected
Declassified assessment says Russia ‘had clear preference’ for Trump, who met with US intelligence chiefs on Friday but refused to endorse their findings

What is certainly interesting in all these revelations about CrowdStrike is the Ukraine connection to the report and to Ukrainian funding for the Clinton presidential campaign. When this is coupled with the Ukrainian Diaspora in the Canadian Government namely the Russo-phobic Nazi sympathiser, the new Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland we see a pattern emerging here. We also start to see the connections with the Ukrainian coup of 22 February 2014 and US and compliant WMSM backing of Neo-Nazi organisations there in an attempt to bring off their dream of regime change in Russia.
So what we see and what we are told is what we get, not truth instead fabricated lies. We might add to this other perception managing deceptions that populate the MSM somehow always targeting Russia. Such as the White Helmets in Syria, if that is really where they are; the hijacked Dutch-led criminal inquiry implicating Russia in the 2014 shoot down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which relied heavily on cryptic telephone intercepts that were supplied by the Ukrainian intelligence service; and of course the recent Laundrama expose of Luke Harding which not surprisingly includes Ukraine in the flow of corrupt money, but focuses instead on Russia.


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jsmith32@hotmail.co.uk
Apr 15, 2017 9:58 PM

all roads lead to the six pointed star and Zionisim…..it’s a Masonic thing created by Khazar Jews

Peter Schmidt
Peter Schmidt
Mar 28, 2017 12:39 AM

It looks like while the MSM has covered the Russian ‘demonstrations’, they completely ignored the million or so protesters in Yemen. It’s sickening. I grew up under communism in the 80s in Hungary, the demise of western MSM reminds me the last days of communism.

Chrissy
Chrissy
Mar 27, 2017 10:39 PM

Oh, Truth Warriors, hold your banners high. So much corruption and disdain for Truth, we need your courage to pursue and bring clarity to those of us watching you and learning from you as we struggle to make sense of the irrational, illogical dribble we are fed. I thank you and salute your efforts and bravery as well as your honorable insights the rest of us mortals sometimes lack.

Dead World Walking
Dead World Walking
Mar 27, 2017 6:53 PM

There’s only one big lie,
It goes a lot like this.
Work hard, believe and buy
You’ll find perpetual bliss.

Manda
Manda
Mar 27, 2017 6:01 PM

Great piece. Thanks. I love it when someone pulls things (evidence and facts) together so clearly and succinctly.

Petri Krohn
Petri Krohn
Mar 27, 2017 4:34 PM

I discussed CrowdStrike and their claims about the DNC “hack” in a previous article on offGuardian. See
Did a Ukrainian University Student Create Grizzly Steppe?
CrowdStrike may be involved in the “Russian hacking” claims in another way too.
The Slate story from October 2016 about the communication between Trump’s email server and Alfabank in Russia is bullshit. There is no way anyone could legally gain access to the information.

Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?
In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.

The story is important because according to Louise Mensch this “discovery” was what allowed the Obama administration to get the FISA court ruling to spy on the Trump campaign.

EXCLUSIVE: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia
Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.
Contrary to earlier reporting in the New York Times, which cited FBI sources as saying that the agency did not believe that the private server in Donald Trump’s Trump Tower which was connected to a Russian bank had any nefarious purpose, the FBI’s counter-intelligence arm, sources say, re-drew an earlier FISA court request around possible financial and banking offenses related to the server. The first request, which, sources say, named Trump, was denied back in June, but the second was drawn more narrowly and was granted in October after evidence was presented of a server, possibly related to the Trump campaign, and its alleged links to two banks; SVB Bank and Russia’s Alfa Bank. While the Times story speaks of metadata, sources suggest that a FISA warrant was granted to look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons.

How did this happen?
Someone in the Deep State decided to do a dragnet search for any communication between domains registered to Trump and servers in Russia. We know that the NSA collects and stores all communications crossing U.S. borders. As part of the data collection they have a database of all DNS requests. This data was data mined to find any sign of communication that could be used to argue for more surveillance.
I do not know if the search was done inside the NSA or outsourced to a trusted commercial partner. (CrowdStrike < href=”https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/news/crowdstrike-accredited-by-nsa-for-cyber-incident-response-services/”>maybe.) This dragnet found some communication between a Russian bank and a Trump mail server. Most likely this was just random noise because of some error or misconfuguration. But it does not matter; this was the needle in the haystack they needed to nail Trump.
The data was first released anonymously by someone named TeaLeaves or Lea Vestea, first through the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) eepsite gdd.i2p, then more and more explicitly on the public internet. Very soon the publications went from technical data to pro-Ukrainian rants about Russia: NATO fought the Cold War and kept Europe free. Does this account explain why the US now debates whether to surrender a war it has already won?
The whole set of confidential DNS logs finally appeared on the site of L. Jean Camp, Professor of Informatics at the Indiana University. It may be that Tea Leaves is some leaker inside the NSA. Others have speculated that she is CrowdStrike. I find it likely that Tea Leaves is Lea Vestea is actually L. Jean Camp.

Cochore
Cochore
Mar 28, 2017 8:01 AM
Reply to  Petri Krohn

Thanks to Wikileaks Vault 7 revelations we now know about

UMBRAGE
The CIA’s hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a “fingerprint” that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.
This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.
The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/
Any “proof” offered by the U.S. therefore is automatically suspect.

Kaiama
Kaiama
Mar 28, 2017 8:36 AM
Reply to  Petri Krohn

tea leaves = cockney rhyming slang = thieves

rtj1211
rtj1211
Mar 27, 2017 3:11 PM

The thing I do not get is this: if Russia ‘hacked the election’, what exactly is it that they hacked?
The only thing which affects the result is hacking computerised counting procedures. Anyone compos mentis since 1996 knows that the US corporations who designed those faulty systems did so to enable vote rigging by US shady interests. Everyone knows Gore was cheated of victory in 2000 by Republican-associated computer vote rigging, even though Gore’s climate policies fill me with disdain, horror and repugnance.
You can argue whether the same happened in 2004, less blatant but could have happened too.
So perhaps if America would indict its own citizens who DEFINITELY rigged Presidential elections and spent less time muck raking about Russia, the USA would not be seen as a failed state filled with corrupt charlatans by the majority of sentient independent minded global citizens…..