Hillary's personal Blackberry was less secure than State-issued ones

A POLITICO review of press pool photos turned up instances of Clinton using her Blackberry in Vietnam, Brazil and South Korea.

The risk of targeted theft of an official’s data is greatest in nations with telecoms that are owned or largely controlled by the government, said Martin Libicki, a cybersecurity expert and senior scientist at the Rand Corporation. That’s because state-aligned hackers could pull any unencrypted data, such as the metadata connected with a phone call, straight off the cell towers.

In Vietnam in particular, analysts say, there’s a concern Chinese government hackers could pull information from the Vietnamese government-owned telecom — either through an intelligence-sharing agreement with Vietnam or because Vietnamese officials make little effort to keep Chinese spies out of their networks…

The security of BlackBerry systems, for instance, is dependent on roughly 600 “IT policies” — essentially security measures that can be switched on or off, according to a person with detailed knowledge about BlackBerry’s federal operations. The more switches that are turned on, the more secure the device or network of devices will be. Individuals generally turn on far fewer of those security measures and take more security shortcuts than would IT professionals charged with keeping State Department information out of the hands of foreign hackers, the source said.