Information from Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized, private email server were found on the dark web, newly released documents from the FBI show.
It has long been suspected that Clinton’s server, located in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., might have been breached by hackers, but that has never been publicly confirmed.
But notes from a independent review, obtained by the FBI and released from “The Vault” on Friday, determined the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer breached a server for Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal, who was passing information about Libya to the secretary of state, and Clinton’s server was “indirectly” hacked likely as a result of the breach of Blumenthal’s server. This information was transferred to a computer or network located south of Bucharest, Romania. The report said a second indirect hack of Clinton’s server by people working on Guccifer’s behalf took place on May 22, 2009, followed by other breaches.
The study found Guccifer used an anonymous server in Russia to carry out the “penetration” and there was a “high possibility” that Russian services monitored these servers and might have a copy.
One file taken from Clinton’s server that was not seen on Blumenthal’s server was found on the deep web, a hidden layer of the Internet not indexed by search engines, and the dark web, a shady constellation of darknets with layers of encryption favored by cybercriminals and hackers.
It is described as an Excel spreadsheet with “targeting data” that would receive the highest level of classification. “If it is determined by the by the FBI that this file ever was overtly classified, it will serve as a potential ‘smoking gun document,'” the notes said.
“This file represents a major loss to the Intelligence Community because it appears to be targeting data,” the notes said. This file was translated from Russian to Arabic, represented a list of targets “possibly” created by a Russian source, “located or intercepted by our services,” and was sent to Clinton by an unknown individual, the notes said.
Guccifer was found to have penetrated “a number of targets” and 37,000 files were found on a computer traced to an IP address he obtained.
Image Credit: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
