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“Network guys are scoping, finding out where else they are, and tracking down all the compromised machines.” “Host forensics guys are finding malware, handing it to the malware reverse engineering team who’s reversing it, finding network indicators, giving it to the network guys,” he recalled. Johnston and his team worked around the clock, in two shifts. It was a decision that would cast a shadow of doubt over the investigation, even though cybersecurity experts have widely accepted Johnston’s main findings.īy “noisy,” he means that the attackers were drawing a huge amount of attention, sending out 50,000 phishing emails, as if they didn’t care that anyone knew what they were doing.Īlong with Johnston and his military cyber team, NSA employees, and contractors from McAfee and Microsoft were also on site, working on the hack, wiping the system and rebuilding it. Better, the DNC figured, to handle things privately. Not only that, but the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. DNC officials said they made the eyebrow-raising choice to go with a private firm because they were worried they’d lose control of their operations right in the middle of the campaign. The party had hired CrowdStrike essentially in place of the FBI - to this day, the Bureau has not had access to the DNC’s servers. But to people dealing with the crisis, “He was indispensable,” as a source close to the DNC put it. Despite his central role, Johnston has never talked with investigators probing Russian interference, let alone with the media.
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Johnston’s account - told here for the first time, and substantiated in interviews with 15 sources at the FBI, the DNC, and the Defense Department - resolves some of those questions while adding new information about the hack itself.Ī political outsider who got the job essentially at random - the DNC literally called up CrowdStrike’s sales desk - Johnston was the lead investigator who determined the nature and scope of the hack, one he described less as a stealth burglary than as a brazen ransacking.