Cyber staffers warned Clinton about personal email

State Department cybersecurity staffers warned Hillary Clinton’s office that the secretary’s private email service was more vulnerable to hackers than the agency’s email service, Al Jazeera reported.

“We tried,” an unnamed current employee told Al Jazeera. “We told people in her office that it wasn’t a good idea. They were so uninterested that I doubt the secretary was ever informed.”

{mosads}It was revealed Monday that Clinton, a 2016 presidential front-runner, exclusively used a private email service during her four years as head of the State Department.

The discovery has raised questions about whether Clinton violated federal laws requiring email correspondences to be archived by the government. But it’s also led many to wonder whether the secretary exposed department information to hackers by relying on an email server with weak security measures.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Clinton hosted her emails through her own Web domain, clintonemail.com.

The domain was registered to Clinton’s family home in Chappaqua, New York. Because the home has Secret Service protection, any email server would have protection from physical hacking.

But noncommercial servers rarely contain the layers of digital security offered by commercial data centers. Additionally, State Department networks benefit from government programs that continuously monitor for intrusions and unusual activity.

Reportedly, in November 2012, Clinton started backing up her private email account on Google’s servers. She later connected her server to commercial email provider MX Logic, which is owned by leading security firm McAfee, five months after resigning as secretary of State.

While this move would have better locked down her archive from digital intrusion, it wouldn’t have necessarily guaranteed the security of her personal domain.

The State Department has insisted no classified emails were sent through Clinton’s personal account.