And The Plot Thickens *Open Thread*

There continue to be questions arising over Hillary Clinton’s email server, especially now that the FBI has been able to resurrect her deleted emails (ahahahahaha). Oh, how the plot has thickened.

First to Hillary Clinton and the emails that have been unearthed. From Bloomberg:

The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.

The FBI is investigating how and why classified information ended up on Clinton’s server. The probe probably will take at least several more months, according to the person, who described the matter on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing and deals with sensitive information. […] (Click here to read the rest.)

I think that is a question we would ALL like to have answered, don’t you? Just how in the world did classified information end up on her private server? Okay – I was being a bit snarky there. I don’t think many of us are confused about that, but I get the FBI has to do the legwork to PROVE it. I bet they will prove it indeed.

And about that whole private server company, the latest news dovetails nicely with the current visit by the Chinese President, Xi. And that would be this little newsflash reported by Breitbart about the company Clinton used:

[…] 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. […] (Click here to read the rest.)

So, yeah – it looks like the Chinese got access to even more than the OPM records they have obtained if they indeed did hack Internap.

Oh, and while I am on a digression about the Chinese, we also got news this week that the number of fingerprints they stoled from the OPM was over 5.5 MILLION. Yep – because NOTHING could go wrong with that, right? Yeah. Sure. Here is more from Reuters:

Hackers who stole security clearance data on millions of Defense Department and other U.S. government employees got away with about 5.6 million fingerprint records, some 4.5 million more than initially reported, the government said on Wednesday.

The additional stolen fingerprint records were identified as part of an ongoing analysis of the data breach by the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense, OPM said in a statement. The data breach was discovered this spring and affected security clearance records dating back many years.

The news came just ahead of a state visit to Washington by Chinese President Xi Jinping. U.S. officials have privately blamed the breach on Chinese government hackers, but they have avoided saying so publicly.

[…]

Officials from OPM and the Defense Department only recently discovered that the additional fingerprints had been stolen as they continued to assess the data breach, OPM said in a statement.

During that process, officials “identified archived records containing additional fingerprint data not previously analyzed,” the OPM statement said. As a result, the estimated number of people who had fingerprint records stolen rose to 5.6 million from the 1.1 million initially reported, it said.

OPM said the total number of people affected by the breach was still believed to be 21.5 million. […] (Click here to read the rest.)

Gee, so glad we are throwing a big ol’ red carpet event for the President of China considering what they did to us. Oh, sorry – ALLEGEDLY did to us, which should be considered an act of aggression. Well, it WOULD be under any other President…

All of that is to say, this government, from Hillary Clinton’s attempt to keep her emails – State and otherwise – unavailable for FOIA requests, or to follow up on what really happened at Benghazi, and so much more, has surely revealed highly classified information to our enemies. Same with the OPM and its lack of security protocols for highly sensitive material, I might add.

But when it comes to Hillary Clinton, the plot has definitely thickened as the news continues to leak out about her recovered emails, and National Security. I have to HOPE that at long last, in one way or the other, she will finally, finally get her comeuppance for lying through her teeth about Benghazi. Hey, we might learn even more about some other lies – who knows? Seems like a pretty good bet to me.

One thing I will bet on, though – this plot will continue to thicken.

That’s what I think. How about you? This is an Open Thread.

Tags: China, Chinese President Xi, hacking, Hillary Clinton, OPM hack