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A US cybersecurity firm hired by a Russian bank to investigate allegations of a secret line of communication with the Trump Organization said on Tuesday there was no evidence so far of substantive contact, email or financial links.



Mandiant, which is owned by the California-based company FireEye, said it examined internet server logs presented to the bank by media organisations investigating the link.

Donald Trump. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The online magazine Slate published a story on Monday about communication between a server hosting Trump domain addresses and a server owned by the Moscow-based Alfa Bank, owned by two oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven. Aven worked with Vladimir Putin in city government in St Petersburg in the early 1990s.

The Slate story, quoting a range of cybersecurity experts, said the communication between the servers suggested it was human rather than robotic, and that it was intended to be secret and exclusive.



In a statement, FireEye said it had been presented with a log of the communication between the servers over a period of 90 days, listing the separate contacts.

“The information presented is inconclusive and is not evidence of substantive contact or a direct email or financial link between Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign or Organization,” the statement said. “The list presented does not contain enough information to show that there has been any actual activity opposed to simple DNS lookups, which can come from a variety of sources including anti-spam and other security software.”

The statement continued: “As part of the ongoing investigation, Alfa Bank has opened its IT systems to Mandiant, which has investigated both remotely and on the ground in Moscow. We are continuing our investigation. Nothing we have or have found alters our view as described above that there isn’t evidence of substantive contact or a direct email or financial link between Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign or Organization.”

