Private contact details of the same national security group that texted plans for military strikes to a group chat on Signal are readily available online — from mobile phone numbers, to email addresses, to the occasional password, two new reports revealed Wednesday.
The data could expose the officials to hostile intelligence services that could conceivably use it to hack communications and plant spyware on those officials’ devices, German newspaper Der Spiegel reported.
Using commercially available people search engines and correlating the results with data that had been hacked and published online, reporters unearthed private information on National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the newspaper reported. The numbers and email addresses appeared current and attached to social media accounts on sites like Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as being linked to WhatsApp profiles, Dropbox accounts and Signal.
Der Spiegel reported it could not determine whether the numbers involved were the same ones their owners used in the Signal chat that looped a journalist into a discussion about bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. However, it was clear Gabbard and Waltz had private, publicly accessible phone numbers linked to Signal accounts.
Also on Wednesday, Wired reported that Waltz and other top administration officials had left sensitive information exposed. Waltz had a publicly visible contact list on Venmo that included 328 people in his personal and professional orbits, ranging from military officers to lobbyists and journalists, among others. So-called soft targets were also visible, Wired reported, including doctors and real estate agents.
While transactions weren’t visible, the Venmo contacts for Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and others were public. Until recently, so were Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s, as The American Prospect revealed in February. His account has since been deleted.
The White House did not comment to Wired, and Gabbard withheld comment to Der Spiegel, the outlets reported. After Wired pointed out the issue, Wiles and Waltz made their contact lists private.