White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is apparently a neophyte when it comes to cybersecurity, particularly on social media.
As hacker The Jester pointed out, Spicer appears to have tweeted two different passwords on two consecutive days, though it isn’t clear if those were his Twitter passwords or email account passwords.
A lack of attention to cybersecurity appears to be a common trait in the Trump administration. Earlier on Thursday, it was revealed the President Trump himself was temporarily at risk of having his @POTUS Twitter account hacked, when it was discovered that the password for the account was tied to a personal Gmail account. Others who attempted to socially engineer the @POTUS account discovered that the password reset option didn’t even have a two-factor verification process, which is having a text with a code sent to a phone tied to that account.
The administration’s loose approach to password protection is particularly hypocritical when taking into account Trump’s relentless attacking of Hillary Clinton during the campaign season, who famously kept a private email server in her home during her tenure as Secretary of State. Shortly after winning the Republican presidential nomination, Trump appeared to call on Russia to hack the server and disclose its contents to the public. The server was frequently criticized as a risk to national security, as it was seen as not secure enough to hold classified information.
Spicer’s account still hasn’t been hacked as of this writing, though if his cybersecurity habits are any indicator, it’s only a matter of time before his account is compromised. The White House spokesman’s password tweeting was mocked by Anonymous, who compared his passwords to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in their similar lack of imagination for secure passwords. Others mocked Spicer’s passwords as “shitty,” encouraging the new press secretary to try harder to not open himself up to hacking. Comedian Patton Oswalt mocked Spicer by tweeting a “password” of his own.
To be fair, fact-checking site Snopes pointed out that Spicer hasn’t clarified what the characters in those two tweets were, or if they were even a passwords at all. However, the site did report that shortly after the tweets were sent, they were promptly deleted, meaning that they could very well have been passwords to an unknown email or social media account.
Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email at [email protected]
