Crowdstrike itself gave the group the name Fancy Bear, with ‘Bear’ referring to Russia and ‘Fancy’ referring to the song Fancy by Iggy Izalea. Crowdstrike’s villain in the report is Fancy Bear, which they say is a hacking group controlled by Russia’s GRU intelligence agency. It’s a slickly produced document, with a frightening comic book-style cover and plenty of charts and graphs.
The Crowdstrike report, titled “ Use of Fancy Bear Android Malware in Tracking of Ukrainian Field Artillery Units“, was issued by the company on December 22, 2016. Trump, the DNC-employed Crowdstrike’s credibility deserves to be called into question, however, despite excellent reporting by cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr, Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky, and Voice of America reporter Oleksiy Kuzmenko, the media has ignored the story and continued to cite Crowdstrike’s work… even after the Ukrainian Defense Ministry issued a statement on January 6th, 2017 refuting Crowdstrike’s claims.Įven more troubling than the media malfeasance about the discredited Crowdstrike report, in testimony in front of the Senate intelligence committee on January 10 – four days after the Ukrainian DOD denied Crowdstrike’s report - Director Comey admitted that the FBI had been denied access to the DNC servers and praised Crowdstrike, without mentioning that they worked for the DNC or that their recent report had been debunked. Earlier this week, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed a Trump surrogate had offered him a pardon in exchange for evidence that would cast doubt on Russian involvement in the Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company working for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), released a report tying “Russian hacking” to an incident that never happened, yet even after the report had been debunked, FBI Director James Comey still referred to Crowdstrike as a “highly respected private company” at a Senate hearing.Įxecutives from Crowdstrike and Director Comey are both scheduled to testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee set for Monday morning at 10 am.īy issuing a still-unrestricted report about an incident that never happened and then tying it to the alleged Russian hacks that Democrats claim tipped the elections for Pres. President Trump has consistently questioned whether Russia was involved, despite definitive attribution from his own intelligence services. That hacking effort had a significant impact on national opinions in the run-up to the election. In 2016, Russian election meddling efforts ranged from Facebook troll accounts - operated by the notorious Internet Research Agency - to a sophisticated and targeted effort to steal and disseminate emails from the Democratic National Committee.
In January, a phishing attack on the Biden-linked Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma was also attributed to Russia in a possible replay of the 2016 DNC server hack, although the evidence for the attribution is tenuous. In February, Facebook took down dozens of accounts believed to be engaged in propaganda campaigns, including many the company attributed to Russia. Neither article describes any specific intelligence from the briefing, but there have already been some public signs of Russia-linked election meddling. President Trump abruptly replaced his acting DNI after the briefing