Not only did Hillary Clinton use a private email address connected to a minimally protected email server hosted in her New York home to conduct confidential federal business for four years, but she hosted the email domain through a private "consumer grade" domain registrar who had hundreds of its domains hacked in 2010.
According to The Blaze, the hackers even redirected some of the stolen information to Ukraine.
While no evidence has emerged that Clinton's email was compromised while being hosted at Network Solutions, the fact that hundreds of its domains were hacked in 2010, a year after Clinton started her job as the head of the State Department, is alarming in itself.
Anyone who hacked Network Solutions would have had the ability to quietly take over Clinton's email domain and intercept, redirect or even spoof email from Clinton's account, reported Wired, noting that at least one hacker, Guccifer, was aware of her private domain and its registrar. It's entirely possible that the nation's top diplomat had emails covertly stolen by a hacker who could be selling secrets on the black market or waiting for the opportune time to release their contents upon the public.
Bill Sweetman, a domain registration expert, told TheBlaze that the entire email scandal seems "naive on the part of the players."
"If you're someone that is concerned about security of your data, you don't go and register your domain name with a consumer-oriented registrar like Network Solutions or GoDaddy," he said.
"You would work either with a corporate domain registrar like MarkMonitor or CVSC, or you would talk to your employer - in this case the government - about their internal solutions that would protect the domain name and would protect the data associated with it."
After Network Solutions was hacked in 2010, Rod Rasmussen, a leading expert on the abuse of domain name systems, wrote a column in the trade publication Security Week saying that anyone using a consumer-grade registrar for a "major enterprise" should be fired from their job.
"When it comes to Internet security, there is absolutely no way major corporations would use consumer grade anti-malware and anti-phishing solutions as a one-stop security solution," he wrote.
