About This Court-Filed Expert Report

This federal litigation expert report was prepared by Anthony J. Ferrante of FTI Consulting, Inc. in Aleksej Gubarev, XBT Holding S.A., and Webzilla, Inc. v. BuzzFeed, Inc. and Ben Smith, Case No. 1:17-CV-60426-UU, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Miami Division. The report is dated May 25, 2018 and was later entered on the federal docket as D.E. 248-2 on October 15, 2018.

FTI was retained by Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in connection with its representation of Defendants BuzzFeed, Inc. and Ben Smith. Ferrante’s assignment examined technical and open-source evidence concerning allegations in the Steele Dossier involving Aleksej Gubarev, XBT Holding S.A., Webzilla, and related hosting infrastructure. The report analyzes IP addresses, autonomous systems and ASNs, threat-intelligence repositories, malware indicators, command-and-control infrastructure, phishing infrastructure, and public and private cybersecurity reporting.

The report addresses technical connections involving the 2016 Democratic Party intrusions and John Podesta spear-phishing campaign; APT28/FANCY BEAR and APT29/COZY BEAR; the DHS/FBI GRIZZLY STEPPE indicators; the Methbot advertising-fraud operation; CRASHOVERRIDE/Industroyer and Ukrainian power-grid attacks; Careto, Potao, Sedreco, Gozi, RIG, PonyUp, DarkHotel, Nitro, and Carbanak malware or threat infrastructure; and the use of XBT/Webzilla-affiliated autonomous systems and IP space in reported malicious cyber activity.

Ferrante’s methodology identifies publicly available infrastructure associated with XBT subsidiaries, compares that infrastructure against government and private-sector threat-intelligence repositories, and then investigates matches to assess the nature of the activity and potential relationships to malicious cyber campaigns. The report also evaluates deposition testimony and XBT’s network-monitoring, abuse-response, customer-onboarding, and infrastructure-governance practices.

Because this is an expert report filed in contested litigation, CyberLawLibrary should describe its technical findings as the opinions and conclusions of the retained expert and FTI Consulting, not as findings adopted by the Court.

Court Filing: D.E. 248-2, entered October 15, 2018

Underlying Matter: Aleksej Gubarev, XBT Holding S.A., and Webzilla, Inc. v. BuzzFeed, Inc. and Ben Smith

Report Date: May 25, 2018

Filed For: Defendants BuzzFeed, Inc. and Ben Smith

Retaining Counsel: Davis Wright Tremaine LLP

Expert Witness / Authorship

Anthony J. Ferrante — Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Cybersecurity, FTI Consulting, Inc.; former White House National Security Council Director for Cyber Incident Response; former FBI Cyber Division Chief of Staff; former FBI special agent and Cyber Action Team member; former adjunct professor and cybersecurity-program co-director at Fordham University.

The report states that Ferrante had more than 15 years of senior cybersecurity experience, had provided incident-response and preparedness services to more than 1,000 private-sector and government organizations, and maintained operational knowledge of more than 60 criminal and national-security cyber threat sets.