From NSA, Cyber Command and CrowdStrike with Love: A New New York Times Russian Hacking Boilerplate

Jan. 14, 2020 (EIRNS)—The Cambridge Dictionary defines boilerplate as “text that can be copied and used in legal documents or in computer programs, with only very small changes.”

The more-than-thrice-told tale released by the New York Times with great fanfare as a new “bombshell” yesterday is just that: boilerplate.

This time the tale is that a U.S. cyber-security firm named Area 1, founded by “former” National Security Agency, U.S. Cyber Command and CrowdStrike hackers, “discovered,”—on New Year’s Eve, no less,—that the Russian military intelligence unit “Fancy Bear” which Special Counsel Robert Mueller had charged with interfering in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, has been hacking subsidiaries of the Ukrainian gas company, Hunter Biden’s Burisma, at the center of the Democrats’ would-be impeachment.

It’s a familiar story:

“It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for,” wrote the New York Times.

“But the experts [sic] say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest [take note!] that the Russians could be [aha!] searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens—the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.”

Furthermore, “The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign”—which hacking former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and team proved never occurred.

There is even the requisite “American security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity” to buttress this tale, opining that “the Russian attacks on Burisma appear to be running parallel to an effort by Russian spies in Ukraine to dig up information in the analog world that could embarrass the Bidens.”

And Area 1 CEO, Oren Falkowitz assures us that “we can only assume [that the timing of the Russian campaign] is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”

Talk about boilerplate: Three professional hackers co-founded the company in 2013. CEO Falkowitz worked for the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command before founding Area 1. The other two co-founders, Phil Syme and Blake Darché, also worked at the NSA; Darché and Falkowitz sat side by side on the NSA’s “elite hacker team” called the Tailored Access Operations group, according to Business Insider. Darché, after leaving the NSA and before setting up Area 1, worked for none other than CrowdStrike, the company whose “forensics” invented the story of Russian hacking of the DNC computers.