(CNSNews.com) – Newly released documents from the State Department reveal that there were 10 attempts to hack then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server between November 27 and 29, 2010.
The documents released Tuesday were obtained by watchdog group Judicial Watch under a Sept. 3, 2015 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
They also show that State Department IT official Brian Pagliano, who set up Clinton's private email server in her New York home in 2009, warned Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper that because the Clintons’ computer system relied on an outside service vendor, it was “susceptible to such an attack.”
“These new emails show that the Clinton email server was subject to an aggressive and targeted hacking attempt. And we now know that yet another government agency, the United States Secret Service, not only knew about the Clinton email system but that it was the target of hacking,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.
According to the released documents, Pagliano sent 10 emails to Cooper alerting him of the hacking attempts, which used the names of senior Clinton Foundation aide Doug Band and Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, in repeated attempts to gain access to Clinton's private server.
Each alert contained the same message from cyber security firm Symantic: “There was a failed logon attempt logged on the server. To check who it was log onto the server and double click on the toolbox icon labeled Failed_Logon_Attempt….”
Cooper then alerted the U.S. Secret Service of the attempted hacking and provided them with the 10 reports Pagliano sent him. He later sent the full email exchange with Paglino to the Secret Service on Nov 30, 2010.
The email exchanges between Pagliano and Cooper can be read below:
From: Bryan Pagliano
To: Justin Cooper
Sent: Monday, Nov 29 10:48:31 2010
Subject: Re:
So, to update you…
The failed logon attempts on the 27th were for username doug and dougband, the failed logon attempts on the 29th were for username huma. Would be useful to know if it was them who tried to log in…
***
From: Bryan Pagliano
Date: November 30, 2010 12:22:55 AM EST
To: Justin Cooper
Subject: Re:
Weird, looks like the attack came from 208.67.222.222 and started at around 5pm.
It’s a company called OpenDNS, they are a fairly reputable organization.
The traffic seems to have cleared up at about 11:50pm. I wonder if they had someone launching an attack from their servers.
That may explain the DNS issue we had earlier. Might have been an injection attack [NOTE: most common and successful attacks on the internet due to their numerous types, large attack surface, and the complexity required to protect against them]. We use their servers to resolve external websites for both the sbs and blackberry server so we’d be susceptible to such an attack. [Emphasis added by Judicial Watch]
