Pence Used AOL email to Conduct State Business which was Hacked

Governor of Indiana, the Indianapolis Star reported on Thursday that Vice President Mike Pence used his personal email account to conduct state business and that account was hacked last summer.

Star disclosed communications of Pence through a public records request stating that AOL emails regarding security of governor's residence, status of arrested people by the FBI on charges of terrorism and the efforts to stop resettlement of Syrian refugees in Indiana.

Cybersecurity experts say that emails of Pence might be just as insecure as of Clinton. Pence was using his private email address but was not running his own private email server which is a significant difference. The hack which caused spamming of Pence's contacts asking for money indicates that hacker prefers to target prominent wealthy people and not a state actor trying to extract Pence's personal records for spicy details on the Indiana state executive.

Techcrunch.com posted on March 3rd, 2017, stating that generally speaking, using one's personal email address for official communications is a pretty bad idea, but it is not illegal.

The Indianapolis Star reports that in the hacking incident last year, email account of Pence was hacked by a scammer who claimed to be Pence and tried to extort money from members of his contact list. This hack did not look to be designed mainly to breach Pence's office which made it clear that his AOL account could be compromised by comparatively gentle breaching techniques designed by spammers and low-level hackers.

The use of personal email to carry out state business could be violation of Indiana's public records law because personal email accounts would not essentially be archived on state servers. Pence's office issued a statement on Thursday denying any wrongdoing and said that Pence followed all applicable laws which include properly archiving emails from his personal account. However, the Star reports that Pence did not make any efforts to preserve his AOL emails under after leaving the office and he is now doing after months when public records requests were first made.

Pence apologized for that incident and created another AOL email account after the hack.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/7/2017