While most did not know about the firm’s existence till now and what a crucial role it plays in maintaining the operability of key global systems, former president Donald Trump had raised questions about the company’s operations way back in 2019.
CrowdStrike gained notoriety during the 2016 US elections, when the Democratic National Committee paid the company to investigate a hack of its server, which it determined emanated from Russia.
CrowdStrike ‘exposed’ Russian interference in 2016 US elections
The company was the first to publicly sound the alarm about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — which Trump won — and CrowdStrike’s assessment was later confirmed by US intelligence agencies.
Since then, Trump has been unable to quell suspicions that Moscow has undue influence over him.
Trump calls Zelenskyy
In 2019, the firm’s name again cropped up after a White House transcript revealed that then President Trump had brought it up in his July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The controversy ultimately contributed to the first attempt at impeaching Trump.
In the call, Trump suggested that Ukraine might possess the DNC server, stating, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … The server, they say Ukraine has it”.
This statement was part of a broader narrative Trump promoted, which aimed to cast doubt on CrowdStrike’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to benefit him.
Conspiracy theories
Trump’s references to CrowdStrike were intertwined with conspiracy theories suggesting that the company was somehow involved in a cover-up regarding the DNC hack. Some of these theories falsely claimed that CrowdStrike’s co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, was Ukrainian and that the company was biased in its investigation.
One conspiracy theory suggested the CrowdStrike, at Ukraine’s bidding, hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 election and pinned the blame on Russia and that the DNC server was somehow based in Ukraine.
In reality, Alperovitch is a Russian-born US citizen, and CrowdStrike has consistently maintained that it operates in a non-partisan manner, providing cybersecurity services to both Republican and Democratic entities.
Political experts have said that Trump’s questioning of CrowdStrike’s findings were meant to undermine the established narrative of Russian interference, which had been supported by multiple US investigations, including the Mueller Report.
Trump’s assertions also ignited a series of conspiracy theories that suggested the DNC had somehow fabricated the hacking incident to distract from other political issues. These theories persisted despite CrowdStrike’s transparent methodology in handling the investigation, which involved creating forensic images of the DNC servers rather than physically seizing them—a standard practice in cybersecurity investigations.