Hey, remember when we told you Sean Spicer left his Venmo account open? You know, those halcyon days of a couple of hours ago? Apparently it got the internet digging even deeper, and discovered the Press Secretary is literally too cheap to keep people from digging up his name and address.
How? WHOIS! WHOIS, if you’re unfamiliar, is a protocol that lets you query who owns a website. Generally it’s used by security professionals and journalists to track who’s behind a website and who’s paying for it. It’s a fairly standard document that spits out the name, address, and other data tied to a website. If that sounds a bit risky for private citizens, it is; most people pay a small fee, usually $8 to $10 a year, to keep this information private.
Spicer didn’t, when he registered the since-erased SeanSpicer.com. And Mashable points out that more or less outs Spicer’s personal data to the entire world, something they confirmed by calling the number:
Since Spicer’s phone number was listed right there, we called it. The first time it went straight to voicemail where Spicer identifies himself and ties himself to a GOP email address. It’s clearly his voice. …When we Googled the phone number, it popped up in a Wikileaks DNC email dump where Spicer, then chief strategist and communications director for the Republican National Committee, was asking Luis Miranda, communications director for the Democratic National Committee to hold the next debate “somewhere warm and fun.” At the bottom of the email, Spicer had his phone number listed.
Mashable points out this means that not only did Spicer’s number leak well before the WHOIS data came out, he didn’t bother to change it when it did leak, which is probably also true of the passwords he tweeted out a few weeks back. Among the slightly less embarrassing revelation is Spicer used to hawk Republican-themed ties, a business you’d think he’d revive considering who his current boss is, and that his Yahoo! email address has been subject to several different breaches.
We’ll remind you that the Press Secretary has access to classified information. And that Spicer is likely far from the only member of the Trump administration who has this problem, including Trump himself.
(via Mashable)