No Links Found between Trump and Russian Bank

A US cybersecurity firm Mandiant investigated allegations of secret communication with the Trump Organization and found no evidence of contact, email or financial links. The cybersecurity firm is owned by the California-based company FireEye. It was hired to examine Internet server logs presented to the Russian bank by media organizations investigating the link.

It all started with a story published by the online magazine a few days ago. It was about communication between a server hosting Donald Trump domain addresses and a server owned by the Russian Alfa Bank. The latter is owned by two oligarchs, one of whom worked with Vladimir Putin in the early 1990s. The story allegedly quoted cybersecurity experts who claimed that the communication between the servers was human rather than robotic and was intended to be secret.

The investigation was launched, where the cybersecurity firm was presented with a log of the communication between the servers over a period of 3 months, listing the separate contacts. Mandiant concluded that the information presented was inconclusive and was not evidence of substantive contact or a direct email or financial link between the bank and the Trump campaign or Organization.

The story in the online magazine said that the Trump server had a capacity for mass email but was only being used for a small amount of traffic, almost all of which was with servers from Alfa Bank. However, other cybersecurity experts later dismissed these claims as “nonsense”, saying the domain in question was actually controlled by a company that handles marketing for hotels, including those owned by Trump. Even the FBI has spent weeks looking into the Alfa-Trump logs, but eventually concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation to the connection – for example, a marketing email or spam.