Documents newly unsealed Thursday in a case involving a Russian entrepreneur and anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele reveal that a tech company owned by the Russian was used to hack Democratic Party leaders.
Aleksej Gubarev, a businessman who runs companies across the world, claims his organizations Webzilla and XBT Holdings were defamed by Steele after the unverified dossier was published by BuzzFeed on Jan. 10, 2017.
The dossier alleged that Gubarev’s companies “used botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘alerting operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.” The dossier also suggested that Gubarev played a “significant” part in the operation while “under duress” from the Russian security agency FSB.
But the unsealed documents on Thursday include a forensic analysis report by a former top cyber expert in the FBI’s cybercrime division that concludes that Gubarev’s companies were indeed used by Russian operatives in an effort to hack Democratic Party leaders, the New York Times reported.