The missing DNC & # 39; of Trump is neither missing nor a server

Donald Trump turns to the right-wing conspiracy theories when he is cornered, and he was cornered on Monday. Standing close to Vladimir Putin at a press conference after their tete-a-tete in Helsinki, a journalist challenged Trump to condemn Putin for the electoral interference of Russia, "in front of the world" . The states have sided with Putin against his own Justice Department and his own intelligence agencies, and have embarked on a rousing speech about Hillary Clinton's emails and an allegedly missing DNC server that hides the truth about The innocence of Putin

the FBI never took the server. Why did not they take the server? Where is the server, I want to know, and what does the server say? "

The server says" shut up. "

The Trump" server "is obsessed with 140 servers, most of them cloud-based, that the DNC was forced to downgrade in June 2016 when it was" down ". she was trying to rid her network of Russian GRU officers working to help Trump win the election, according to figures from the DNC's civil lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign, and 180 desktops and computers The laptops were replaced by the DNC race to get the organization back on their feet and free themselves from Putin's surveillance.

But despite Trump's repeated and feverish assertions, there is no such thing as Missing Machines

It is true that the FBI does not have the computer hardware of the DNC.The agents did not rush into the DNC headquarters, did not charge all the equipment and let the Democrats stand, stunned, next to the empty desks and cables hanging in. There is a reason for that, and that has nothing to do with a conspiracy of the State to fudge Putin.

Trump and his allies benefit from a misunderstanding of how computer intrusion investigations work. Investigating a virtual crime is not an investigation into a murder. The Russians did not leave any DNA evidence on the server racks and fingerprints on the keyboards.All evidence of their whereabouts was on the hard drives of the computer, and in the memory, and in ephemeral transmissions from the network to and from the command and control servers GRU control

When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called "imaging." They make an exact byte-by-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine's memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic that passes through the victim's network. This has been the standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the hardware of the computer, provide the proof.

The DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, engaged to respond to the violation, have repeated over the years that they had handed over to the FBI a copy of all the DNC images. in 2016. The DNC reiterated this Monday in a statement to the Daily Beast.

"The FBI has received images of servers, forensic copies, as well as a host of other forensic information that we have collected on our systems," said Adrienne Watson, director DNC Communications Assistant. "We were in close contact and working in cooperation with the FBI and always responding to their requests, and any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect. "

The FBI declined to comment on this story, but in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last year, James Comey stated that Crowdstrike"

At the same hearing, Comey it's complaint that the DNC had not given the FBI direct access to the DNC's servers. It's unclear why Comey wanted the FBI to operate on the DNC live network, but if the DNC was bothering, it would not be an unusual call, especially five months before polling day.

"The FBI is investigating and prosecuting crimes, and we are looking to get the system back into service as quickly as possible. Williams, one of the many incident response professionals interviewed for this story. "I can honestly tell you that if I had been part of that answer, I would not have advocated calling the FBI – every minute that the FBI goes on to keep the players at stake, that's all." It's a minute that I do not come back to prepare for the election, I would have absolutely shared pictures with them. "

Kenn White, security expert and former DHS advisor, agreed that the FBI did not expect direct access to DNC computers. in the world by giving them forensics, and in-depth and inverse-level engineering of these implants and flipping it over. "

In some versions of the servergate conspiracy theory now espoused by Trump, nothing less than physical possession of the material will suffice, because Crowdstrike, a respected security society barred by a former FBI agent, could be part of Deep State Efforts to Frame Putin. White mocks this notion, noting that the National Republican Congressional Committee is one of Crowdstrike's clients.

"J & # 39; I've responded to incidents of defense contractors and health care groups, it's a common practice, "said White." It's completely defensible in terms of best practices and what was happening "

This is also consistent with the Department of Justice's Electronic Evidence Manual, which recommends capturing images when it's convenient even when the FBI executes a search warrant against a non-cooperative suspect.When computers belong to a cooperating victim, seizure of the machines is virtually out of the question, said James Harris, a former FBI cybercrime officer who worked on a breach in 2009 at Google that has been linked to the Chinese government

.Most cases that you do not even ask, you assume that you are going to make forensic copies, "said Harris, now vice president of the Engineering at PFP Cyber. "For example, when Google's violation occurred in 2009, agents were sent with express instructions that you image what they allow you to do. Image, because they're the victim, you do not have a search warrant, and you do not

There is one last piece of evidence that the FBI got what's wrong. 39 he wanted to the DNC, and he was dropped off in US District Court in Washington DC last Friday: 29 pages of details how and when the GRU hackers moved through the DNC network on their mission to help Trump.

If the president really wants to know what the DNC server says, everything is in the indictment against the hackers of Putin. He just has to listen.