The contact details for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were found online, with some of them still connected to services such as LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
The information was obtained by German-based Spiegel via a public people search and data leaks, showing additional vulnerabilities in the defense community after the Signal group chat leak.
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The outlet said it was "particularly easy" to find contact information for the high-ranking Hegseth. The newspaper added that it used a commercial provider of contact information to obtain his Gmail and mobile phone number.
The Pentagon chief's email, and, in some cases, password were available in "over 20 publicly accessible leaks," and it was used just days ago. The number led to a WhatsApp account with a profile picture of Hegseth that the newspaper said has since been deleted.
Waltz's contact information led to even more social media avenues. Profiles for his Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Signal were found.
Gabbard's info was not as readily available as Waltz's and Hegseth's. Hers could not be found via a commercial search, but the outlet found her email on WikiLeaks and Reddit. Her information was reportedly contained in more than ten data leaks and contained a partial phone number that led to an active WhatsApp account and a Signal profile.
The German outlet said it chose to not publish their information.
Waltz was also found by Wired to have kept his active Venmo account's friends list public. The list reportedly included White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Fox News's Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and hundreds of others. None of his transactions were public.
Wiles's friends list was also publicly available, which included Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“We take our customers’ privacy seriously, which is why we let customers choose their privacy settings on Venmo for both their individual payments and friends lists—and we make it incredibly simple for customers to make these private if they choose to do so," a Venmo spokeswoman told the outlet.
The friends list offers foreign agencies easy access to intelligence, giving them information to each person's network of acquaintances and friends. “The first thing you think of is the counterintelligence issue, right? And the security vulnerabilities. It kind of boggles the mind, in a way,” Michael Ard, a former intelligence analyst, told the outlet. “It would be really easy for somebody to spoof a contact, and that is something the security industry has already been issuing notices on.”
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Democrats have attacked the Trump administration over the Signal leak, which revealed information that likely could have jeopardized an airstrike on a Houthi target in Yemen. “I think this is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information,” Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) said on Tuesday.
The Trump administration has insisted the chat did not contain any classified information, something many people dispute.