Why our technological ignorance is hurting Hillary Clinton
And the msm and Republicans and other play into this ignorance to play up the story into a fictitious 'scandal"
Why our technological ignorance is hurting Hillary Clinton
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/09/why-our-technological-ignorance-is-hurting-hillary-clinton/
By Philip Bump October 9 at 8:30 AM
The personal e-mail server that Hillary Rodham Clinton used was repeatedly subject to hacking attempts from users in China, South Korea and Germany in 2014, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. Which seems as though it confirms some of the worst fears of Clinton's detractors: an insecure system, with foreign agents peeking in.
But to Peter Fidler, president of the tech firm WCA Technologies in New York, the story is much less alarming.
"It's not unusual at all" that there would be attempts to hack into her server, Fidler said when we spoke with him by phone on Thursday. "Basically what it means -- a hacking attempt [is] they'll try to log in as admin, sysadmin, administrator ... they'll try many different types of names and not give up. We used to see that a lot. We would capture all these things and then block entire countries."
In other words, that someone from China tried to hack into Clinton's server doesn't mean 1) that they were targeting Clinton specifically, 2) that they were agents of the Chinese government, or 3) that they were actually able to access information.
Hackers will often "port scan" IP addresses to find vulnerable systems. An IP address is the number that indicates where a computer exists on the Internet, a little like a street address. Port scanning -- for which there exist online tools -- is a bit like casing a house to figure out how to get in. There are certain default network ports that are used for Internet-based services. Port 80, for example, is usually the port that servers use to allow Web traffic. Hackers can check the open ports on a number of IP addresses quickly -- and then try to see if they can use the ports to access the server.
It's complicated to explain, but not in itself unusual, as Fidler indicated. (The AP article itself notes that "t was not immediately clear whether the attempted intrusions into Clinton's server were serious espionage threats or the sort of nuisance attacks that hit computer servers the world over."
But the story reinforced one of the challenges that Clinton faces as the e-mail server story continues to slowly unfold: People don't really understand how the Internet works, and so the stories might sound more ominous than they otherwise would.....
= new reply since forum marked as read
for some things and it has pretty good built in security, but not critical as it's all sitting in RFC1918 space-
Working on new product/project and we will have a mail server (probably SurgeMail as well) sitting on the public intertubes but damn sure will have a firewall. Actually, just gave myself an idea, wonder if you can use an SBC to protect a mail server? What is better than dynamic blacklisting 
One of them I'm trying to recruit internally then what he is doing can be backfilled, and probably have to look to the street for an SBC guru since I'm pretty close to vendor selection- we can look for specific skill set-
We actually just got a new CIO recently, everybody including him are talking woo hoo NVF is the next biggest greatest thing!
For me being on the telecom side I'm like, blah, not ready for prime time until the chipsets improve. Couple vendors have tried to do transcoding for example in a virtual environment with very poor results
I would be remiss in exiting this thread without giving my friends and foes , alike, on this board a 
and just warn you the most dangerous place to be in the midst of a hanging is between the posse and the intended victim.