A newly released email from WikiLeaks shows that Hillary Clinton knew using a private email posed a serious cybersecurity risk. It seems, however, that she just didn’t care.
“We were attacked every hour of every day and not only through the State Department system, but also through individual, personal accounts, just really fishing for anything they could get,” Clinton said in a private speech to employees of Deutsche Bank AG.
The speech was given in October 2014 and was attached to an email sent to her campaign chair John Podesta, whose emails were hacked.
“I don’t think we’ve yet taken it seriously enough as a nation,” Clinton said before explaining what she did at the State Department to strengthen cybersecurity.
“I think this is a rolling threat that will only increase in intensity and so I appointed the first ever cyber security expert in the State Department,” Clinton added.
In July, however, FBI Director James Comey criticized her email practices, saying that Clinton and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
In the course of its investigation, the FBI found that Clinton’s private server was breached by a hacker using the web anonymity service Tor.
Emails released since then in response to Freedom of Information Act requests by the groups Judicial Watch and Citizens United reveal numerous attempts to breach the server through the accounts of top Clinton aides Doug Band and Huma Abedin.
Brian Pagliano, one of the staffers who set up the Clintons’ personal email system, alerted staff in November 2010 to a handful of apparent attempts to illicitly access Abedin’s and Band’s clintonemail.com accounts.
Abedin sent an email two months later to Justin Cooper, another Clinton aide overseeing the email system, complaining that her “Clinton [black]berry” was not working.
“We were attacked again so I shut it down for a few min,” Cooper replied.