FBI report: Bill Clinton aide’s email account on private server hacked

Though there is still no evidence that Hillary Clinton’s private email server was hacked or that any of her accounts were hacked, it does appear that one of Bill Clinton’s staffers’ email accounts on the Clinton family server may have been hacked.

The newly released FBI report notes “scanning attempts over the course of the course of [Bryan] Pagliano’s administration of the server, though only one appears to have resulted in a successful compromise of an e-mail account on the server.”

{mosads}It is extremely common for all servers connected to the internet to be scanned for vulnerabilities and does not imply any foreign actor or foreign knowledge of the server. 

The FBI report notes that, on January 5, 2013, server logs show a computer or computers using the Tor network accessing the staffer’s account. The staffer, whose  name is redacted but is referred to as “her,” claims not to have been familiar with the tor network.

Tor routes internet traffic through a series of internet addresses to make internet traffic anonymous. Since the internet addresses that connect to the actual website – or in this case email server – are known, it’s easy to tell if Tor traffic reaches a server even if it is hard to know who was behind it. On January 5, 2013, three addresses matching Tor internet addresses accessed the server. 

The identity of the person or persons who accessed the staffer’s email is not known.

For the server and not just a single account to be hacked, an attacker needs to have the ability to monitor more than a single account. That would mean administrator or administrator-like access, or broader, system-wide monitoring.