Clinton techie Bryan Pagliano knew server was ‘susceptible’ to hacking

Hackers appeared to try at least two different styles of attack on Hillary Clinton’s secret email server in November 2010, her top techies said in emails obtained by Judicial Watch, which released them Tuesday.

Bryan Pagliano, the Clinton staffer who has refused to speak to Congress, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, said the secret server was hit with a denial of service attack, which attempts to be disruptive, and an injection attack, which attempts to gain control of operations.

The server detected 10 failed logon attempts on Nov. 27 and Nov. 29. At least some of those were attempting to use credentials for Huma Abedin and Doug Band, both friends and associates of the Clinton family who had accounts on the server. Mr. Pagliano said it may have been the two themselves, muffing their login attempts.

But he said there had been actual attacks, too.

“Might have been an injection attack launched from their servers prior to this denial of service attack,” Mr. Pagliano said, adding that the way the server was set up to handle Blackberry email traffic, “we’d be susceptible to such an attack.”

The FBI, which investigated Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, said it discovered hack attempts, but said it could not say one way or the other if any attempts were successful. Mrs. Clinton’s server was too outdated, and the capabilities of potential foreign hackers too good, to be able to trace them afterward, FBI Director James Comey told Congress this summer.

Judicial Watch said another red flag from the messages, provided by the State Department to the group last week, was the redaction of one email recipient. The State Department said the U.S. Secret Service had been consulted about the redaction.

“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,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “The Clinton email scandal has now widened to yet another Obama administration agency.”

The newly released messages were among some 15,000 emails Mrs. Clinton didn’t turn over to the State Department but which the FBI recovered during its investigation.