The company that Hillary Clinton paid to manage her private email network was the victim of a massive international hack during the period in which Clinton was employing it, Breitbart News has learned.
Hillary Clinton used the company Internap as the internet service provider for her private email account during her tenure as Secretary of State. Internap, based in Atlanta, has a facility in Manhattan, near the the physical location of the IP address for clintonemail.com.
In March 2011, the security company RSA was hacked. The hackers got into the company’s system through a malware-infested email sent to an employee, then installed a “backdoor” and stole data. RSA called it “an extremely sophisticated cyber attack.”
RSA was not the only victim of the attack. A victim list showed that more than 760 other organizations were also “compromised.” Internap appeared five times on the full victim list.
Five different “blocks” of Internap hosted services – which could include websites, email services, and email-storage and cloud services – were hit in the 2011 attack. A computer expert tells Breitbart News that Internap networks could have been used by the hackers to help it get to RSA or other targets.
China was the home source of 299 of the 338 command and control networks that the hackers used to carry out the attacks, according to an analysis at the time by cyber security expert Brian Krebbs.
The names of the domains used by the hackers included taunts at the United States. The domains included “usgoodluck.com,” “obama.servehttp.com,” and “prc.dynamiclink.ddns.us.” (The “prc” in the latter domain might have represented “People’s Republic of China,” according to Krebbs).
Internap, like other Internet service providers, was also the victim of numerous less-sophisticated denial-of-service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks during the period that Clinton was employing the company. In a DDoS attack, the targeted computer is clogged by the orchestrated arrival of many millions of commonplace computer-to-computer contacts.
“Internap is under a huge DDOS attack affecting our CDN,” an executive at a Fillipino online market told customers on Google Plus on September 5, 2011. “We currently turned off our CDN until Softlayer/Internap solve the CDN issues.”
“Who the hell can DDOS huge providers like Internap wherein it can affect the entire CDN service? Poor engineering or still the achilles heel of cloud computing?,” the executive added.
The attacks continued.
“Just got confirmation from Internap NOC that they are being attacked again,” a poster commented on a tech forum in February 2014. “Causing quite a bit of chaos for my network in SoCal. ”
“*grumble* I wonder if that’s what’s causing the NANOG video stream to be choppy?,” another commenter replied. “I know Internap is providing the connectivity for the conference. If so, I sure wish the attackers would have waited one more day.”
During Superstorm Sandy, Internap published a snarky tweet making fun of rival Amazon before its own data center went down during the storm.
Could ‘Frankenstorm’ Lead To Another AWS #Outage” Internap tweeted.
When Internap’s New York building closed due to flooding, a user tweeted back, “Karma a bitch for @internap?”
Hillary Clinton’s private email server went down during Superstorm Sandy, which was one of three known times that Clinton’s server went down while she was at the State Department. As Breitbart News reported, Clinton’s server had an open webmail portal that made it highly vulnerable to hackers.
Internap did not return a request for comment for this report.
But Internap was not the only Hillary Clinton email contractor that could have exposed Clinton’s confidential data to hacks.
Clinton’s email domain clintonemail.com is managed by a company called Network Solutions, which manages domains and provides a service that Clinton uses to protect the anonymity of the people running her server from mandatory disclosures on databases.
In 2010, potentially 500,000 Network Solutions domains hosted malware on their sites as part of a hack involving a Ukranian “attack server.”
“We have received reports that Network Solutions customers are seeing malicious code added to their websites, and we are really sorry for this experience,” a Network Solutions spokesperson said in 2010. “At this time, since anything we say in public may help the perpetrators, we are unable to provide details.”
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