Posted on 04/09/2015 9:04:27 PM PDT by Art in Idaho
I was afraid this was going to happen. The rumor is Hillary is going to adorn the TV screens this weekend and announce she is thee Democrat candidate in the 2016 presidential race.
This after one of the biggest scandals of the last 50 years, that of premeditatedly releasing the contents of her private server during her tenure as Secretary of State. Whether this was for her own blackmail reasons, money laundering, or to secure even more bribes for the Clinton Foundation remains to be seen but I can envision of slew of potential indictable offenses not to mention straight out treason.
I thought this was going to hit the MSM and alternative media bigtime in early March. I coined a brief summary of how I felt in Hillary just Recused Herself. In it I expressed the thoughts of the magnitude of the blackmail potential if she were elected president in essence negated the possibility of her running. It looked to me the national security and blackmail angles were a no brainer.
Others have expressed serious concerns about the severity of her server lapse.
I will list many good articles for your review and end with cogent recent FReeper comments:
How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House Summary points:
"To get to the White House, the hackers first broke into the State Department, investigators believe."
"The State Department computer system has been bedeviled by signs that despite efforts to lock them out, the Russian hackers have been able to reenter the system. One official says the Russian hackers have "owned" the State Department system for months and it is not clear the hackers have been fully eradicated from the system."
"As in many hacks, investigators believe the White House intrusion began with a phishing email that was launched using a State Department email account that the hackers had taken over, according to the U.S. officials."
"The revelations about the State Department hacks also come amid controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server to conduct government business during her time in office. Critics say her private server likely was even less safe than the State system.. . But hackers have long made Clinton and her associates targets."
"The website The Smoking Gun first reported in 2013 that a hacker known as Guccifer had broken into the AOL email of Sidney Blumenthal, a friend and advisor to the Clintons, and published emails Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton's private account. The emails included sensitive memos on foreign policy issues and were the first public revelation of the existence of Hillary Clinton's private email address now at the center of controversy: hdr22@clintonemail.com."
Next article: Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal Is FAR WORSE Than Benghazi
Salient points:
” Aside from the dubious ethics involved in Hillary Clinton’s personal email server to avoid public accountability, there is a much more serious threat to U.S. national security that she has created by this action. In fact, this may be far more serious that her Benghazi coverup. Newsmax reports: Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer tells Newsmax TV he believes Iran, Russia and China routinely read Hillary Clinton’s emails detailing sensitive government business.”
”Fleischer, who served under George W. Bush, said the disclosure that Clinton had used a personal email account — not a government one — during her time as secretary of State made her dispatches vulnerable to hacking."
“If it’s done from a personal account, I guarantee you China, Russia and Iran have them,” Fleischer said Wednesday on “The Steve Malzberg Show.”
” The thought of foreign powers having access to the most sensitive U.S. government information is a very scary thought. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton would have been privy to the most classified of information. But, through her obsessive need for control, she may have endangered us all.”
”This new scandal has the potential to affect every American – a U.S. Secretary of State unwittingly sharing classified information with foreign powers. It may fall a bit short of treason, but it certainly disqualifies her from ever holding a sensitive government job again; especially that of Commander-in-Chief should she get elected as President.”
”“If it’s a personal email, it’s simple for it to get hacked by a foreign adversary. Think of a Secretary of State for every day that she’s in office is cc’ing Iran, Russia, China and other adversaries on every single email that she sends and every one that she receives.” Who knows what damage to U.S. national security Clinton has done through this effort to protect herself from scrutiny and possible embarrassment.”
” A thorough Congressional investigation is now warranted into the matter. We all need to know just how much danger Mrs. Clinton has put America in because of her obsession. Were the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA aware of this breach of protocol and security? Who else knew about this “independent” email server and did nothing?”
”We, the American people deserve answers. Our safety and security are at stake. Mrs. Clinton must come clean if this security hole is to be plugged and the damage done be assessed and addressed. This now goes far beyond politics and Mrs. Clinton’s personal political ambitions!”
Next article: Hillary Clinton's No Good, Very Bad Email Security
Major points:
” That the Secretary of State was using her own email provider with its own security precautions—or lackthereof—is highly concerning. Though we're just now learning about Clinton using the email address for official business, security experts say foreign intelligence agencies probably already knew about it.”
”The risk of this email account being compromised is significant"
” Hacked emails of Clinton's have been released before. In March of 2013, Sidney Blumenthal, an adviser to Clinton, was hacked by, and his emails, sent to "hdr22@clintonemail.com," were leaked. Those emails were not encrypted, meaning they could be read by a hacker who intercepted them in transit, by her email provider, or, in this case, by someone who hacked a person she corresponded with.”
"The risk of this email account being compromised is significant," he wrote. "With no visibility into how the Clinton’s emails were being secured, it would be impossible for the government to ensure the communications were not compromised by espionage."
Next article: Hillary’s Secret Email Was a Cyberspy’s Dream Weapon
Salient points:
”On March 14, 2013, Guccifer—his real name is Marcel-Lehel Lazar—broke into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist, former White House aide to Bill Clinton, and personal confidante of Hillary Clinton. Lazar crowed about his exploits to journalists, disclosing a set of memos Blumenthal had written to Clinton in 2012, as well as the personal email address and domain she’s now known to have used exclusively for her personal and official correspondence.”
”When her address was exposed, Clinton was running her private email account on equipment in her home in New York, which security experts say is an inherently weak setup that made her more vulnerable to hacking.”
”But “assuming that the domain is ‘secret’ is a dangerous assumption,” Johannes Ullrich, a computer security expert with the SANS Institute, told The Daily Beast. “A not-well-published domain does not provide significant protection,” Ullrich said. “As seen in the Guccifer incident, it is easy to unmask such domains if just one of the individuals she is corresponding with is breached. At the same note, running a mail server securely is difficult.”
”Had security experts checked the system, they might not have liked what they saw. One security scan this week revealed that the domain uses “obsolete and insecure” protocols and gave it an overall F rating.”
”At the very least, she should have been worried about individuals impersonating the [clintonemail.com] domain,” Ullrich said. Setting up standard mail filtering mechanisms and proper security certificates “would be a first step, but that should have happened right from the start,” he said.”
Next article: Jailed hacker Guccifer boasts, “ I used to read Clinton’s memos. . . and then do the gardening”
Salient points:
”Before I leave, Lehel assures me that, far from rehabilitating, Guccifer is still plotting inside his cell. He is anticipating a collaboration with US security services “when the time is right”. He says he has “a lot more material saved in the cloud.”
“The Guccifer archive isn’t complete and many intelligence services are interested in it. Hot Palestinian documents. Problems in the near future for the Western world. The whole archive is around 30 GB. That’s the submerged part of the iceberg.”
Next article: SIGINT COMSEC and the HILDEBEEST: Readers’ Digest Version
Salient points:
”From a SIGINT perspective, the Secretary of State is a High Value Target - not for destruction but for electronic surveillance and collection. The collection is conducted not only by hostile governments, but by friendly ones as well - our allies spy on us, and vice versa.”
”If you take classified message traffic and put it on a THUMBDRIVE - never mind your own personal server - that is a COMSEC violation right there. If I or any of my buddies holding a clearance did a thing like this we would be in Leavenworth breaking big rocks into little rocks. But not the Hildebeest; she is going to walk without even being charged. Democrat or Republican, the law is the law or at least it should be.”
”If anyone thinks that Hillary Rodham Clinton sent 50,000 e-mails in four years and there wasn't an increased risk of "spillage" they are smoking dogfood (I won't say if they are inhaling or not). No doubt she spilled a lot. She was handing information to our enemies, and the NSA COMSEC guys were likely going berserk. Others have been fired for less. Hillary's above the law - Richard Nixon would be smiling (some of you will catch that reference right away. Others will have to look it up).”
Next article: Hillary Clinton’s personal BlackBerry less secure
Salient points:
”Clinton insisted in a press conference last week that her private email account and the server that housed the emails were never breached — a statement that drew raised eyebrows among security experts who noted that many breaches can go undetected for months, years or even forever — hiding even from people trained to root them out.”
”Perciballi responded to the claim by paraphrasing a cybersecurity maxim: There are two kinds of people — those who have been breached and those who don’t yet know they’ve been breached. To be even mildly confident of the “no breaches” claim, Perciballi said, he’d want a team of specialized forensic analysts to personally inspect the network and emails.”
”“The generic caution to anyone who is of high interest to a foreign intelligence service as Ms. Clinton would be is to just assume that any business you’re conducting over non-secured networks — so a personal device or a government one — is something that’s going to potentially be targeted by foreign intelligence service,” said Michelle Van Cleave, former National Counterintelligence Executive during the George W. Bush administration.” “When you’re on an unclassified network,” she said, “the advice is just to assume you’re not secure wherever you are.”
Next article: Experts tell Gawker: Hillary’s shoddy private e-mail security is a potential national security disaster
Salient points:
”We already knew it was bad. Not until you read this will you understand how bad. In fact, I debated with myself whether to even include the word “potential” in the headline. The reason it’s there is because cybersecurity experts can’t say for an absolute fact that foreign governments infiltrated her server. All they can say is that it’s a virtual certainty given how high a priority she is for enemy hackers and how clumsy her defenses were.”
” Security researcher Dave Kennedy of TrustedSec agrees: “It was done hastily and not locked down.” Mediocre encryption from Clinton’s outbox to a recipient (or vice versa) would leave all of her messages open to bulk collection by a foreign government or military. Or, if someone were able to copy the security certificate Clinton used, they could execute what’s called a “man in the middle” attack, invisible eavesdropping on data. “It’s highly likely that another person could simply extract the certificate and man in the middle any user of the system without any warnings whatsoever,” Hansen said.”
” The invalid certificate would have also likely left Clinton vulnerable to widespread internet bugs like “Heartbleed,” which was only discovered last spring, and may have let hackers copy the entire contents of the Clinton servers’ memory. Inside that memory? Who knows: “It could very well have been a bunch of garbage,” said Hansen, or “it could have been her full emails, passwords, and cookies.” Heartbleed existed unnoticed for years. A little social engineering, Hansen said, could give attackers access to Clinton’s DNS information, letting them route and reroute data to their own computers without anyone realizing. “It’s a fairly small group of people who know how to do that,” Hansen noted, but “it’s not hard—it’s just a lot of steps.”
”And that’s not all. Hillary’s server appears to be configured with a public login page, allowing her — or anyone else — to access the server from anywhere in the world with the right login and password. In other words, not only was she beaming confidential information out onto the Internet, where it could have been intercepted at various points, instead of routing it through secure federal government servers, she actually placed a doorway into the server on the Internet so that people with the right key (namely, her) could access it easily. That’s “pretty much the worst thing you can do” to a network that’s meant to be private, let alone sufficiently top secret to serve a cabinet member, said one security expert to Gawker. And on top of all that, there’s a chance that by using a .com domain, Hillary may have inadvertently steered classified government info to innocent people who had no intention of receiving it.”
” What I don’t understand is why she wouldn’t take precautions to keep them away from prying Russian/Chinese eyes too. Remember, she was warned by State’s IT people that private e-mail wasn’t secure. Even if she was a total tech ignoramus, that was her wake-up call to pay someone to secure this server. She didn’t. Even if you think, as I do, that most voters won’t care about this, it’s still a major unforced error by someone who’s been planning to run for president in 2016 since before she became Secretary of State. As it is, imagine President Hillary arguing with Putin over Ukraine circa 2018 and him warning her to stand down or else a few damaging e-mails from her time at State might just end up mysteriously being leaked to the New York Times. She’s left herself wide open to foreign blackmail. Inexplicably.”
Salient points:
”Hillary has no protection. There are no official copies of her email, under government control, to protect her from being accused of using her office for corruption. So what is there to keep a foreign government from “creating” an email that infers that she received funds to the Clinton Foundation in return for some then or future favor. What if this government, when she is President, threatens her with releasing multiple emails that implicate her in all sorts of skullduggery? What protection does Hillary Rodham Clinton have against such a threat?”
”None. To avoid a scandal, perhaps at an inopportune time requiring all her political capital, she would have to give the foreign government what they wanted, or have a slew of emails released showing all sorts of communications. How could she deny them? She can’t. She used her own server, and she has no defense to say that such messages did not come from her.”
”Any outside enemy of the United States can use that against her, as President. Which means she can never be trusted to be acting in the best interest of the United States ever again. That’s why the Server is a class A-1 scandal. Will conservatives recognize this, and point out this threat before she gains power and is blackmailed into acting against the interests of the United States? We can only hope. In the meantime, her actions in reference to the server and emails totally destroys her credibility. This is no minor scandal. And this is no minor threat.”
Next article: Why the Clinton email server story matters — and why it may be worse than you think
Salient points:
“This matters for three reasons.
”1. The Secretary of State is a very “high value target” from the standpoint of nation-state threat actors. The President, Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA would also qualify in this top tier. These individuals handle the most important, most sensitive, most dangerous and therefore most interesting information to foreign intelligence.
“2. Nation-state threat actors represent the top of the food chain in terms of adversaries in information security. Nation-states can bring the most talent and resources to bear in this arena. For all the worry about cybercriminals and terrorists, everyone in information security looks at nation-state threat actors as the most advanced and sophisticated threat to defend against.”
”3. “Take #1 and #2 together and you have a situation where the very high value targets are threatened by the most advanced and sophisticated offensive information security capabilities out there. Put another way, the best of the best are gunning for those people to get their information.”
” The third point is critical: if the best of the best are after your information, you need the best of your best protecting it. And there is simply no way that a “homebrew” server is EVER going to have the security and resources appropriate to defend it adequately. Looking at it this way, a “homebrew” server was the worst possible choice.”
Next article: Is Hillary Clinton Vulnerable?
Salient points:
”Fox’s James Rosen reports that “a determined band of hackers, IT bloggers, and systems analysts have trained their specialized talents and state-of-the-art software on clintonemail.com . . . and uncovered serious lapses in security, according to data shared with Fox News”: Perhaps most concerning, private analysts determined that clintonemail.com has been running an older model of Microsoft Internet Information Services, or IIS—specifically version 7.5, which has been documented to leave users exposed on multiple fronts. The website CVEDetails.com, which bills itself as “the ultimate security vulnerability datasource,” is awash with descriptions of serious security vulnerabilities associated with version 7.5, including “memory corruption,” “password disclosure vulnerability,” and the enabling of “remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service.”
” The cyberlab technician who discovered the Clintons’ use of version 7.5 marveled at “the vulnerabilities the Clintons are ignoring” in an email to Fox News. “This is a big deal and just the thing real-world hackers look for in a target and will exploit to the max,” the source said. “Several of these vulnerabilities have been known since 2010 and yet HRC is running official State comms through it.”
And from Talisker here at FR:
” Fact is, Hillary had THOUSANDS of emails between her private, unsecured email system and the State Department email system. Therefore the Russians (and everyone else) could easily not only break into her system, but then use her own emails to piggyback into the State Department system and probe it - and from there to every other government agency and the White House. What Hillary did was - literally - high treason. The ENTIRE Federal government is now compromised. This is a security breach so huge, we literally have to scrap everything and start all over again. It is possible that the US simply has no secrets from its enemies anymore - Hillary literally, and deliberately, GAVE THEM AWAY. And THAT is the TRUTH.”
And from TheCipher here at FR:
” For the first 3 months she was running her server, access to the server was not encrypted or authenticated with a digital certificate. So for 3 months this opened the server to snooping, hacking, and spoofing. Without a certificate, there could easily have been a ‘man in the middle attack’ where they could easily intercept communications because they’re not being encrypted and impersonate her.”
So there you have it, a cybercriminal in our midst. Accidental or deliberate? She’s going to announce she’s running for President this weekend. How can this be with the depth of her server hack, national security breach and potential blackmail risk?
Americans cannot and will not submit our Sacred Republic to this kind of risk. This is war. For the love of God, will someone or some agency please speak up?
My prognostication?
It’ll be forgotten. There’ll be occasional noise and some indigestion over it, but nothing of any real impact or effect.
We don’t know how to fight. We bluster for a little while than sit back down and shut back up.
The domestic enemy knows full well we wont go the full measure. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing we can do that will amount to anything more than an occasional and ultimately meaningless blip on the scanner.
It is safe to ignore us. We’ve done nothing but prove and reinforce that belief.
If Nixon had put his White House tapes on Hilary Clinton’s private email server, his picture would now adorn the $100 dollar bill.
I'm also not convinced she's in the best health, though we'll never hear of it......
You may be correct!
I’ve seen it too. Not as quick on the draw and almost fearful looking at times. I thought her scripted UN ‘press conference’ was so rehearsed. . One got the impression she was ready to run out of there. .
Server, server, in the basement. Who’s the smartest woman of all.
Maybe whoever leaked the Climategate e-mails will leak Hillary’s next.
My prediction? The MSM will protect her, so we’ll hear little more about it. However, if something else pops up prior to nomination that seems to doom her electability, the MSM will destroy her to ensure a donk wins the general.
Good one!
Good synopsis
Thank you hoosiermama. We’ll see if anyone in the beltway makes an issue of it. We’ll see. .
Hillary's Server Conundrum: Is it going away?
Check out article and # 1.
Observation about Hillary's health at # 7, w photo.
A month or two ago, someone on FR mentioned *they* didn't think Hillary will live much longer because physically she has difficulty balancing herself, and she appears unwell.
Art, that is a scary photo you just posted. ... Good article.
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