Hillary Clinton admitted the State Department’s network was vulnerable to cyberattacks Sunday in an exchange that highlighted criticisms of her use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
“The State Department was attacked at least every day, if not several times a day while I was there,” Clinton said during an interview with a radio station in Boston. “Many of those were repelled by the security protections that were in the system, but we know there have been increasingly sophisticated attacks that are penetrating.”
Yet at the time of these cyberattacks, Clinton was shielding her electronic records on a server she reportedly constructed herself.
Critics have claimed the practice left her communications open to cyberattacks in a world where the threat of a high-profile hack grows larger every day.
“The president’s personal email was gone after in a cyberattack on the White House system. We have to give this the highest priority,” Clinton said Sunday, according to the Boston Herald. “We have to do everything we can to work not only to protect government information, because obviously that is important, especially top-secret information, intelligence information.”
Because Clinton conducted her government affairs exclusively on a private server, sensitive information was reportedly mixed in with her personal communications before the presidential candidate selected roughly 30,000 emails to submit to the State Department and deleted the rest.
Her commitment to transparency was called into question last week when the House Select Committee on Benghazi announced it had received 60 new emails from a witness, Sidney Blumenthal, that had not previously been disclosed.
The State Department has refused to say whether agency officials or Clinton herself withheld the newly-discovered emails from a batch of Benghazi-related materials released to the public last month.
