About Guccifer's new hacking claim

[paulthompson]

As some of you may know, I've put together a Clinton email scandal timeline, at thompsontimeline.com. I'd like to point out some facts that relate to Guccifer's new hacking claim.

I don't know if what Guccifer says is true or not. I'm sure hard evidence will come out one way or another in time. But for Clinton supporters who are touting reporting like this:

"An internal FBI review of Clinton’s email records did not indicate traces of hacking, a source familiar with the situation told POLITICO."

Keep in mind that the security logs provided to the FBI were given by Bryan Pagliano, who managed Clinton's server while Clinton was secretary of state. In February 2013, his job at the State Department ended the same time Clinton left office. One month prior to that, Clinton was already looking for someone new to manage the server, so it appears he stopped managing the server around that time.

Guccifer hacked into Sid Blumenthal's emails on March 15, 2013, and found out about Clinton's emails and her clintonemail.com server that way.

It's not clear when Pagliano stopped managing her server - it could be that nobody was managing it for a few months. But by June 2013, the Colorado company Platte River Networks took over managing the server and Pagliano was definitely out of the picture. Then this happened:

June 2013 to October 2013: During this time, it appears that Clinton's private server is wide open to hacking attempts. On May 31, 2013, maintenance of the server was taken over by a small Colorado-based company called Platte River Networks, and the server is sent to a data center in New Jersey. Platte River Networks then pays to use threat monitoring software called CloudJacket SMB made by a company named SECNAP. SECNAP claims the software can foil "even the most determined hackers." However, the new software doesn't begin working until October, apparently leaving the server vulnerable. It is known that the server is repeatedly attacked by hackers in the months from October 2013 on, but it is unknown if any attacks occur when the software is not yet installed. Justin Harvey, chief security officer of a cybersecurity company, will later comment that Clinton "essentially circumvented millions of dollars' worth of cybersecurity investment that the federal government puts within the State Department. ... She wouldn't have had the infrastructure to detect or respond to cyber attacks from a nation-state. 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." (The Associated Press, 10/7/2015)


Then the software was finally installed and this happened:

October 2013 to February 2014: Clinton's private email server is the subject of repeated attempted cyber attacks, originating from China, South Korea, and Germany. The attempts are foiled due to threat monitoring software installed in October. However, from June to October 2013, her server is not protected by this software, and there is no way of knowing if there were successful attacks during that time. A 2014 email from an employee of SECNAP, the company that makes the threat monitoring software, describes four attacks. But investigators will later find evidence of a fifth attack from around this time. Three are linked to China, one to South Korea, and one to Germany. It is not known if foreign governments are involved or how sophisticated the attacks are. Clinton had ended her term as secretary of state in February 2013, but more than 60,000 of her emails remained on her server. (The Associated Press, 10/7/2015)


So the claim that there was no evidence of hacking attempts clearly only refers to the time Bryan Pagliano was managing the server. Afterwards, with the domain name broadcast to the world through the Guccifer hack story (which was reported at the time in Gawker, the Russian Times, and other media outlets), incredibly, Clinton did not shut down her server or take her emails from her time as secretary of state off it. She did change emails, but to a different account on the same server (it went from [e-mail] to [e-mail]).

Whether Guccifer got into her server then, I don't know. But it defies belief that nobody did, when the server was wide open to hacking attempts not long after the Guccifer hack revealed clintonemail.com was where Clinton stored all her emails. If the Russians, Chinese, and other foreign government didn't scoop up all her emails then, they were totally incompetent.

So this claim about Clinton's server logs showing no hacker attempts is a red herring, and is only partially true at best. Even if you disregard the fact that any talented hacking attempt leaves no traces in the logs, it doesn't matter much if there were no hacker attempts from 2009 to 2013 because there was such opportunity from 2013 onwards, and all of Clinton's emails were still there! This is why the former heads of the NSA, CIA, DIA, Defense Department, and so on have said that it's assumed foreign countries did get her emails, because they were such a wide open and vulnerable target.