But, Behar adds, there's evidence that this course material was stolen, and allegations that George Kurtz is a plagiarist persist.
The scandal eventually forced Foundstone to sell out to nutjob McAfee, where co-founder Stuart McClure went to work for a while. McAfee even offered up a free toolkit that gives a simplified idea of what Foundstone's services (and Mandiant's) were/are about -- something that looks a lot like Microsoft's configurable Administrative Tools. George Kurtz, Foundstone's CEO, another co-founder, also went on to McAfee for a spell and is now co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike -- you remember, from the DNC hack in 2016? Kurtz has picked up some enemies on the way, if this account is accurate. Kevin Mandia went on to have a brief stint at Man Tech, a cybersecurity firm, full of "ex"-spooks and Pentagon types, and who brag that they are "the number one employer of military veterans in the nation," where he picked up some more "skills," before founding Red Cliff Consulting (2004), which he rebranded in 2006 to Mandiant.
In 2011, Kevin Mandia made a big splash before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for the US House of Representatives. He made an astonishing statement regarding how corporations, many of whom will have have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure their networks with equipment and personnel, were told of being breached anyway:
The majority of threat intelligence is currently in the hands of the government.
Indeed, more than 90% of the breaches MANDIANT responds to are first detected by the government, not the victim companies. That means that 9 in every 10 companies we assist had no idea they had been compromised until the government notified them.
How would the government know? How would Mandia know? Mandia, the former forensics expert at Foundstone, even had the cheek to add that once armed with "Threat information," companies would have the knowledge to stop their intellectual property from being stolen.
A year later, in 2012, Mandiant was called in to solve the mystery of breaches to the NYT, WaPo and the WSJ, and others. Mandiant and CrowdStrike went on to blame Chinese hackers. Kurtz was even strangely quoted in WaPo at the time, saying, "I don't know of a network that hasn't been breached." They provided a photograph of the building in Shanghai from which the hacking by Unit APT 10 took place, they named the actors, and they all got indicted by the US government for the alleged crimes. There is no possibility that any of them will ever be tried, so it's largely symbolic. It would have zero impact on their activities.
A year later, in 2013, FireEye, at the center of this year's hacking event, bought out Mandiant for $1 billion dollars -- a lot of money for a still-fledgling intellectual-protection company, run by a guy who worked with pirated software. FireEye itself draws questions because it has received in the past seed money from the CIA's venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Presumably, they expected something back for their investment.
In 2016, both Mandiant (Mandia) and CrowdStrike (Kurtz) were called in to solve the mystery of the DNC "hacking." This is a good place to mention that CrowdStrike, too, has ex-spooks, including a Big Fish, former assistant director of the FBI, Shawn Henry, who, as his brave CrowdStrike profile crows,
joined CrowdStrike in 2012 after retiring from the FBI, where he oversaw half of the FBI's investigative operations, including all FBI criminal and cyber investigations worldwide, international operations, and the FBI's critical incident response to major investigations and disasters.
Again, it seems fair to inquire as to whether Ed Snowden's homo contractus rule applies here. Were/Are Mandia, Kurtz and Henry doing what Snowden did (and explained) when he wore a Dell Computer badge but actually continued working for the CIA, and later, for Booz Hamilton, for the NSA?
If so, it would shed an entirely different light on the investigation of the 2016 DNC "hack" by Mandiant and CrowdStrike, although, strangely enough, it helps explain why CrowdStrike's testimony before the Mueller Commission was so weak, as it's been reported by Ray McGovern at Consortium News that
The FBI relied on CrowdStrike's "conclusion" to blame Russia for hacking DNC servers, though the private firm never produced a final report and the FBI never asked them to...
This is probably a good place to mention that Bob Mueller was the director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013. He worked closely with Shawn Henry to spy on Americans. Illegally.
Mueller and Henry were part of the 2004 sweeping (and illegal) domestic collection of citizen data, known as StellarWind, that James Risen had written about -- the piece that was quashed by an editor as a favor to Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA. The StellarWind program produced "leads," according to the NSA, that the FBI was said to be reluctant to follow because of the NSA's overstepping their mandate (they're limited to overseas collections), and the lack of a warrant -- they said, but they did it anyway.
And speaking of despicable FBI behavior, let's remind ourselves of the Horowitz Report that essentially condemned the FBI for its shoddy work in vetting the dodgy Steele Dossier, which was passed around to lefty publications, like Mother Jones, to con the Left with lies, as well as used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants to wiretap, without probable cause it turns out, members of Trump's campaign team. This was on Obama's watch. As evil as Trump is, the Obama administration essentially interfered in the 2016 election. He should be impeached, retroactively.
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