Citing Malware, Company Aims to Connect Russian Military to DNC Hack

Similar Malware Also Targeted Ukrainian Military Phones

Hired by the DNC to investigate the hacking attack against them earlier this year, CrowdStrike has claimed “high confidence” that the hacking was carried out by the Russian military, because of certain similarities between the malware on the DNC computers and previously known malware.

The company says that the malware a similar to a form of tracking malware which targeted the phones of Ukrainian army personnel back in 2014, using an app meant to target for Ukrainian artillery as a point of ingress, and revealing the locations of Ukrainian troops.

The two forms of malware obviously can’t be identical, since one is for an Android phone and the other is targeting servers. It’s not totally clear how similar these two forms of malware actually are, as CrowdStrike just describes them as “linked.”

Yet this link may well be built heavily around pre-conceived notions of Russian involvement in both cases, assuming that malware benefiting the rebels in East Ukraine must be Russian military in origin, and taking the existing assumption that the Russian were behind hacking the Democrats to link the two incidents.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.