By now, we have heard, at length, about how Hillary Clinton mishandled email during her time as Secretary of State. It’s all the GOP wants to talk about, despite the fact that even the director of the FBI said what Clinton did was stupid, not criminal, much to the annoyance of some. Trump, in particular, will not stop talking about Hillary’s use of emails, promising to jail her over the issue if he’s elected. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump himself has email servers even less secure than Hillary’s.
Network security expert Kevin Beaumont performed a basic check of the publicly available information about Trump’s email servers, and found that they were ripe for the picking. Trump’s organization runs Windows Server 2003, which Microsoft hasn’t supported since 2015, and is easily accessible via the internet; Beaumont collected all this data from checking the public-facing web page of Trump’s email server. Furthermore, Trump’s organization hasn’t updated the software at all and has essentially left the stock software running for potentially more than a decade. If you were wondering, Hillary Clinton was apparently running Windows Server 2008 on her server.
This may land Trump in much deeper hot water than even Clinton faced over her emails. While Trump has never held any government role, Trump is receiving regular security briefings and is no doubt being regularly contacted by government officials who may be sharing sensitive information with him. This is, of course, exactly what Clinton did. But the trouble doesn’t stop there. Even if he’s been refusing to communicate about official government business via email, he and his organization still likely have confidential business information stored on these servers. Depending on the contracts he has in place, he could be legally accountable for the security of that data, and might be in breach of contract as a result. It’s hardly Trump’s worst blunder on the campaign trail, but it’s yet another mark against him at a time when he doesn’t need any more.
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