Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email increased security risk

LA TimesMaybe you’ve seen the new coverage in the past few days about Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal email during her time as Secretary of State. Long story short: While serving as Secretary of State, Clinton never used a government-provided email address and instead exclusively used an email account hosted on her private server. We’ll leave the politics of this to other blogs, but the email security implications here are important, too.

Whoever set up her email didn’t totally know what they were doing. Her server set-up left her open to spoofing. We’ve written extensively about spear phishing before – which involves sending spoofed emails – but can you imagine the damage that could be done if a hacker had been able to send spoofed emails from Mrs. Clinton?

Our own Cameron Brown was quoted on the topic in a story that ran in today’s LA Times:

Security experts said Clinton essentially traded one form of protection for another by shielding her messages from open-records laws but giving up the industrial-level security of an employer that manages countless other email accounts, said Cameron Brown, vice president of engineering at Sendio Inc., a Newport Beach-based firm that develops email security and screening tools.

You can read the full story here.

Whether you’re the Secretary of State or not (we’ll assume you’re not), email security is a big deal to your company. You don’t want your email address or inbox to fall into the hands of a hacker. Sendio’s Email Security Gateway™ keeps your inbox clean and safe with a system of malware filters and reputation scoring technologies to eliminate the spam from your inbox without the headache of false positives and lost mail. Schedule a demo to learn more.

Are you a member of the press with questions about email security? We have your answers. Drop us a line if you want to talk: [email protected].