It's funny you say that, because I'm a security engineer and I talked to loads of other security engineers who didn't question it. People at the top of the field. It looked bogus as hell at the time, but you couldn't easily say so.
Hackers are as susceptible to partisan politics as anyone else. At least we now have the benefit of the CrowdStrike President's declassified testimony.
It took me forever to find out that the “back channel” with trump tower and Alfa Bank was a hacked Point-of-sale terminal in the lobby sending spam mail. Snopes still laughably lists this as “unproven”
I remember at the time thinking “what are they doing, using an IRC channel?”
I was screaming inside when the FBI started waving around that they had evidence and all they could show for it in public at the time was a handful of incoming HTTP requests from Russian IPs.
I get hundreds of MB of traffic from Russian, Chinese, etc IP addresses every week scanning for drupal/wordpress/etc vulnerabilities. It hardly meant anything.
Worse still is that we know that this happens and my colleagues still just go along with whatever companies like CrowdStrike or Trail of Bits or whoever say. Like we make business decisions based on their word alone. They're popular, so they must be correct. Group think is real and there's large numbers of us who aren't as capable as we claim to be. 95% of the work for most is checking the boxes on compliance questionnaires and getting shut down/stalled by the engineering & ops teams who actually make their companies money.
Hackers are as susceptible to partisan politics as anyone else. At least we now have the benefit of the CrowdStrike President's declassified testimony.