“To really investigate a high profile intrusion like the DNC hack, you have to look beyond the victim network,” Rid said. Rid, who wrote a detailed explanation about why Russia was likely behind the DNC hack for Motherboard in July 2016, told me that “from a forensic point of view, the question of a server at this stage doesn’t make any sense.”

I called up Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies to help explain the technical details behind this type of forensic investigation. CrowdStrike declined a request for comment from Motherboard. However, in March 2017, former FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the FBI got an “appropriate substitute” from CrowdStrike, and Mueller’s indictment makes clear that the FBI has lots of information about the hack from both within the DNC and from other sources. I say “widely believed,” because we don’t know exactly what CrowdStrike gave to the FBI. It is widely believed that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to respond to the hack, gave an identical image of some of the servers to the FBI, which experts I’ve spoken to say would be more useful than giving the FBI a physical server itself. The long answer is that there is no 'server'-there are many different servers and pieces of internet infrastructure in question, and the United States intelligence community and independent security researchers have examined much of it and have all reached the same conclusion: Russia hacked the DNC.

Does the fbi have the dnc server