Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reportedly used the same weak password for multiple online accounts over the course of several years.
A review of leaked records from WIRED revealed that Gabbard used an “easily cracked” password across multiple email addresses and online accounts around the time she served in Congress between 2013 to 2021.
In their report published Tuesday, WIRED wrote they were able to review Gabbard’s passwords using “databases of material leaked online created by the open-source intelligence firms District4Labs and Constella Intelligence.”
Their review found no indication that she used the password for government accounts, but found that it was used for several personal accounts on multiple occasions instead.
The outlet reports that a password used for an email account tied to Gabbard’s personal website, was used as a password for her Gmail account as well. Records of this password date to 2019.
That same password was apparently also used for Dropbox and LinkedIn accounts associated with the email address for her personal website, with records dating to 2012.
2018 records also show the password being used on a MyFitnessPal account tied to a me.com email address that was also used for HauteLook, a since-defunct e-commerce site. These records have apparently been available online for years and are easily accessible through commercial databases, according to WIRED.
A spokesperson for Gabbard, Olivia Coleman, told the Daily Beast in a statement: “This is a non-story. As I told WIRED last week, these data breaches happened nearly a decade ago, and the passwords have changed countless times since.”
The national intelligence director’s seeming password misstep is not her first blunder since assuming the role.
The former representative was also part of a Signal group chat leak in March, where The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added to a text chain discussing military operations in Yemen.
Gabbard, along with other top Trump officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were members of the group chat.
