Hacker Who Broke Into Clinton’s Server Says ’10 Other’ Outsiders Had Access

By Jonah Bennett Published on May 5, 2016

Now sitting in a Virginia jail cell, the legendary hacker known as Guccifer has described just how easy it was to break into Hillary Clinton’s private email server in early 2013.

In an interview with Fox News, Guccifer, also known as Marcel Lehel Lazar, said he first broke into Sidney Blumenthal’s AOL account, which he then used to gain access to Clinton’s email server. Blumenthal is a close associate of Clinton and has provided her with private intelligence services.

Guccifer said when he first broke into Clinton’s server, the contents were totally uninteresting, and so he only accessed it “like twice,” Fox News reports.

After extensive research, Guccifer said he managed to guess Blumenthal’s security question to his email account. That’s when he saw several emails from Hillary Clinton and checked the raw email data to find out the originating IP address. With the address in hand, he conducted a scan of the server to find open ports, but how he actually moved from conducting a simple scan of the server to actually breaching the server is not described in the Fox report.

Interestingly enough, in the course of breaching the server, he said he found at least 10 other IP addresses that were accessing the Clinton files.

“As far as I remember, yes, there were … up to 10, like, IPs from other parts of the world,” he said.

Clinton’s server at the time was located inside her house in Chappaqua, New York. She used this personal email address to conduct official government business while serving as Secretary of State.

Clinton said Tuesday on MSNBC that no other foreign hackers had accessed her server. In a statement to Politico, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon totally denied Lazar’s statements and said he was an unreliable source of information.

“There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell,” Fallon said. “In addition to the fact he offers no proof to support his claims, his descriptions of Secretary Clinton’s server are inaccurate. It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims.”

Computer security experts interviewed by Fox have noted that the attack as Lazar described it seems quite plausible.

“This sounds like the classic attack of the late 1990s. A smart individual who knows the tools and the technology and is looking for glaring weaknesses in Internet-connected devices,” Bob Gourley, a former chief technology officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Fox News.

In the meantime, Lazar is fully willing to cooperate with the U.S. government. He also has two gigabytes of incredibly sensitive data that he has not released, as he calls it a “matter of national security.” For Lazar, that data may function as a good bargaining chip.

 

Follow Jonah Bennett on Twitter. Send tips to [email protected].

Copyright 2016 The Daily Caller News Foundation

 

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