Demystifying CrowdStrike Conspiracy Theories—Cyber Saturday

CrowdStrike conspiracy theories are proliferating after people learned the cybersecurity firm's name was mentioned on a call between Trump and the President of Ukraine.

On a July 25th call with his Ukrainian counterpart, U.S. President Donald Trump made peculiar reference to a cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, that has been the subject of fantastic musings by conspiracy theorists. The theorizing kicked into overdrive after the White House on Wednesday released a declassified recap of the conversation, which has provoked a whistleblower complaint and an impeachment inquiry.

CrowdStrike, whose name readers of this newsletter may already recognize, is the digital forensics firm that investigated breaches at the Democratic National Committee in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Why did its name surface on the call? It’s not entirely clear. But the mention begins to make some sense if one entertains fringe beliefs, fantasies, and paranoid speculation.

Here’s what Trump said to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky:

I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like to get to the bottom of it.

Ultimately, the president seems to be alluding to an idea that alt-right commentators and pro-Russia sympathizers have pushed for years: that CrowdStrike was wrong about Russia hacking the DNC—and, moreover, that CrowdStrike intentionally blamed Russia for political reasons. CrowdStrike’s findings have, of course, been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, members of Congress, and the office of Robert Mueller. Last year the government indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking plot.

The conspiracy theorists object. They say that the FBI should not trust CrowdStrike. (CrowdStrike provided the bureau with digital images of the DNC’s hacked systems, as is common in this line of work.) They say CrowdStrike’s findings are suspect because the company has ties to Google, whose former chairman and CEO, Eric Schmidt, supported the election of Hillary Clinton. (CrowdStrike is backed a private equity firm, CapitalG, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.) They say CrowdStrike is owned by a Ukrainian billionaire. (A cofounder of the Calif.-based company was born in Moscow and moved to America as a teenager.) And they say CrowdStrike is under the influence of Viktor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch. (Pinchuk funds a think tank, the Atlantic Council, where the aforementioned CrowdStrike cofounder is a senior fellow.)

These straw-grasping claims and distortions of fact are fuel for the fire of disinformation. Further, the notion that there is some missing “server,” and that the server might exist somewhere—like in Ukraine—has no basis in reality. The DNC’s network consisted of many servers and computers which either had be put out to pasture, rebooted, or rebuilt to rid them of malware and intruders. As the DNC explained in a 2018 lawsuit filed against the Russian government, it had to “decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers” as a result of the hacking.

CrowdStrike is mostly keeping quiet amid the storm, saying only that it stands by its findings. “With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” a CrowdStrike spokesperson wrote in an email to Fortune. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”

Robert Hackett | @rhhackett | robert.hackett@fortune.com