Cybersecurity is arguably a painful subject to Hillary Clinton – but it is also one she is no doubt invested in.
Whatever her expertise, Washington DC-based FireEye Cyber Defense Summit apparently thought it was sufficient to invite her as a central figure of the event scheduled for October.
True, Clinton’s cyber- especially cybersecurity credentials may have been shaken when it was discovered that she used a private email server for official State Department business while serving as the US secretary of state.
But there’s more to the term “cybersecurity”, especially in Clinton’s case.
In the years since her 2016 loss to Donald Trump, Clinton and her political and media circle have engineered a campaign aiming to explain her defeat with cyberattacks, fake news, and misinformation spread online.
With all that in mind, it’s not hard to see why the FireEye Cyber Defense Summit may have thought it was a good idea to let Clinton deliver the keynote speech.
Indeed – according to the previous announcement, Clinton and FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia were to star in a Q&A panel dedicated to “the geopolitical landscape and its implications for global cybersecurity today.”
Alas, unforeseen consequences stood in the way.
These circumstances, the website said, remained unknown since both the conference and a Clinton spokesperson were not sharing any details.
IT professional and federal whistleblower Nate Cain published the email from FireEye, announcing Clinton would not participate after all – and accompanied the news with a lot of “lol’s.”
The private, insecure email server she used while at the helm of the State Department was later said to have been “hacked by China.”
At the time the case was being investigated, Clinton was at one point quizzed by a journalist who wanted to know if she was responsible for deleting, i.e., wiping some content from the server.
At the time, it didn’t sound like delivering a keynote at a major cybersecurity conference would be in her future when she replied:
“What, like with a cloth or something? I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”
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