The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Washington—Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server, which stored some 55,000 pages of e-mails from her time as secretary of state, was the subject of attempted cyberattacks originating in China, South Korea and Germany after she left office in early 2013, according to a congressional document obtained by The Associated Press.
While the attempts were apparently blocked by a “threat-monitoring” product that Clinton’s employees connected to her network in October 2013, there was a period of more than three months—from June to October 2013—when that protection had not been installed, according to a letter from Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. That means her server was possibly vulnerable to cyberattacks during that time.
Johnson’s letter to Victor Nappe, CEO of Secnap, the company that provided the threat monitoring product, seeks a host of documents relating to the company’s work on Clinton’s server and the nature of the cyber intrusions detected. Johnson’s committee is investigating Clinton’s e-mail arrangement.
Clinton has not said what, if any, firewall or threat protection was used on her e-mail server before June 2013, including the time she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 and the server was kept in her home in the New York City suburbs.
A February 2014 email from Secnap reported that malicious software based in China “was found running an attack against” Clinton’s server. In total, Senate investigators have found records describing three such attempts linked to China, one based in Germany and one originating in South Korea. The attacks occurred in 2013 and 2014. The letter describes four attacks, but investigators have since found records about a fifth, officials who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly said.
It was not immediately clear whether the attempted intrusions into Clinton’s server were serious espionage threats or the sort of nuisance attacks that hit computer servers the world over. But the new revelations underscore the extent to which any private e-mail server is a target, raising further questions about Clinton’s decision to undertake sensitive government business over private e-mail stored on a homemade system.
Any hacker who got access to her server in 2013 or 2014 could have stolen a trove of sensitive e-mail traffic involving the foreign relations of the United States. Thousands of Clinton e-mails made public under the Freedom of Information Act have been heavily redacted for national security and other reasons.
Clinton “essentially circumvented millions of dollars’ worth of cybersecurity investment that the federal government puts within the State Department,” said Justin Harvey, chief security officer of Fidelis Cybersecurity.
“She wouldn’t have had the infrastructure to detect or respond to cyber attacks from a nation-state,” he said. “Those attacks are incredibly sophisticated, and very hard to detect and contain. And if you have a private server, it’s very likely that you would be compromised.”
A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not answer detailed questions from The Associated Press about the cyber intrusions. Instead, spokesman Brian Fallon attacked Johnson by linking him to the House Benghazi committee inquiry, which the campaign dismissed in a recent media ad as politically motivated. AP