Hackers tried to get into Clinton’s email server

The attacks are different in nature than the one Clinton received in five emails in August 2011.

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, whose Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee is investigating, says the attempts were apparently blocked by a “threat monitoring” product.

The committee is requesting a broad scope of materials from the company by October 19, including contracts, data retention policies and documentation of any cyberattacks that Johnson said could have compromised Clinton’s emails. Clinton’s server was syncing with Datto’s off-site server, a finding which one Platte River employee characterized as “a problem”. “I know they had you cut it once in Oct-Nov, then again to 30day in Feb-ish”.

“Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up a few shaddy [sic] s–“, the employee said in an email to a colleague, according to McClatchy. Cybersecurity experts identified those emails as common “phishing” attacks, a widely-used tactic among hackers.

The Petraeus emails, first discovered by the Defense Department and then passed to the State Department’s inspector general, start on January 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older email account.

Despite the release of thousands of emails by Clinton, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the GOP-controlled Congress are separately investigating whether there were any security breaches because of the practice. Investigators asked the company to preserve all data they had in relation to former Secretary of State Clinton, The Washington Post reported.

The internal emails, which were obtained by Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act, have since been classified. The company does not have security clearance.

Datto, of Norwalk, provided data backup services to Platte River Networks, the firm Clinton hired to maintain her email server.

Platte River spokesman Andy Boian told Politico, however, that this went against the firm’s initial agreement with the Clinton team. “Or perhaps refer the work elsewhere”, Boian said. As long as the emails existed in 2013 and weren’t altered in any way following Datto’s acquisition, a lot of Clinton’s information could still be left on the cloud.

The report comes amid ongoing scrutiny over the security of Clinton’s server and the scope through which classified documents were shared over it. Cloud storage, even in a closed system like Datto’s, would mean that the data would be transmitted and parsed through several server and storage systems, making it almost impossible to isolate and secure to any level that would satisfy government specs for even routine traffic.