Their big claim to (public, non-technical crowd) fame before this was their role in "auditing" the DNC servers. It was their widely-disseminated claim that the DNC servers were hacked by Russians, who subsequently gave the DNC emails to Wikileaks. Later, under oath, in 2017, CrowdStrike's president of services and chief security officer Shawn Henry admitted to the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that they not only had no evidence that the data was hacked by Russians, but that they had no evidence that it was exfiltrated at all (rather than leaked), but rather that it was an assumption. Unfortunately this admission wasn't declassified until the Mueller report was publicly released and many people had already been fooled, and (in my eyes) did little to establish Crowdstrike as a reliable or trustworthy organization.
Some notable quotes from Shawn Henry regarding this from that hearing:
>"There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left."
>"There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated."
>"There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network. … We didn't have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made."
>"Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn't see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw."
>Asked directly if he could "unequivocally say" whether "it was or was not exfiltrated out of DNC," Henry told the committee: "I can't say based on that."
Some notable quotes from Shawn Henry regarding this from that hearing:
>"There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left."
>"There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated."
>"There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network. … We didn't have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made."
>"Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn't see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw."
>Asked directly if he could "unequivocally say" whether "it was or was not exfiltrated out of DNC," Henry told the committee: "I can't say based on that."
https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/shawn_henry_tes...