Findings this week suggest that if Hillary Clinton ever used a private network to print documents from her home-based server, that printer could have been breached by hackers.
The information came from Internet address maps stored by Farsight Security, a San Mateo, Calif.-based tech company. The map indicated that one of the subdomains attached to the former secretary of state's "clintonemail.com" address had been given the less-than-subtle name, "printer.clintonemail.com."
It isn't clear whether Clinton ever used the address to actually attach an Internet-connected printer. If she did, it could have served as another attack vector for hackers to access the information that was transmitted.
"Whoever set up their home network like that was a security idiot, and it's a dumb thing to do," Ronald Guilmette, a private security specialist, told Brian Krebs, who noted the vulnerability on his tech blog. "Not just because any idiot on the Internet can just waste all your toner. Some of these printers have simple vulnerabilities that leave them easy to be hacked into.
"People are getting all upset saying hackers could have broken into her server, but what I'm saying is that people could have gotten confidential documents easily without breaking into anything," Guilmette added. "So Mrs. Clinton is sitting there, tap-tap-tapping on her computer and decides to print something out. A clever Chinese hacker could have figured out, 'Hey, I should get my own Internet address on the same block as the Clinton's server and just sniff the local network traffic for printer files.'"
If Clinton's network specialist was unfamiliar with the potential vulnerabilities, it is unlikely Clinton had any more familiarity. Earlier emails obtained from her server indicate she experienced considerable difficulty using Internet-connected devices, often relying on aides instead. One 2009 exchange between Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin made headlines for revealing how Clinton was once forced to walk away from an inoperable fax machine, despite Abedin's best effort to advise on how to fix it.
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