In a bold strategic shift , White House Press Secretary Sean “Alternative Facts” Spicer appears to have tweeted something true from his account this morning. Unfortunately for him, it might have been his password.
This morning, Twitter noticed that Spicer tweeted and quickly deleted a string of nonsense that looks considerably more like a password than it does a pocket tweet.
A few screenshots floating around indicate that Spicer also tweeted a bit of nonsense yesterday too, though that tweet does look more like a classic pocket/butt tweet (it happens). Given the alternating letters and numbers, today’s incident looks a lot more like a weak randomly generated password. Because seriously, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of not choosing your pet’s name, you might as well toss in some special characters and alternating caps.
Unfortunately for Spicer, if the tweet was in fact his password, hackers are likely busy at work cross-checking it with every other account imaginable. Between this sort of thing and Trump’s emotional dependence on his trusty old unsecured Android device , the new administration may have some major security concerns as it moves out of its first week in the White House.
As a few people have pointed out, another explanation is that Spicer might have been using Cloudhopper , the SMS service Twitter acquired back in 2010. We’ve reached out to Twitter for insight on how this one might have gone down.
But before we jump to conclusions, let’s consider one more possibility: cats.
The keyboard cat theory is compelling, but maybe Spicer is just having a long week and letting off a little steam. It’s cool, sometimes we feel n9y25ah7 too. Did you know that it’s only Thursday? It’s only Thursday!

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An embarrassing collection of poor choices in account security by the Trump administration created a stir this week, worrying those who already doubt the team’s expertise in cybersecurity. There were already risks to having a Twittering President , and these oversights confirm them.
The most serious lapse by far is the use of private Gmail addresses for the Twitter accounts of senior officials in the administration, including the President, Vice President, and Press Secretary. While a handful of email addresses and phones are standard issue for people in such elevated positions, the private ones are not supposed to be attached to official outlets like the @POTUS account.
There were reports that the Twitter accounts also did not have two-factor authentication enabled — but the way Twitter operates 2FA makes it nearly impossible to tell that.
The 2FA message is only sent after the user has clicked on the password recovery link in the email sent by Twitter, which means to know whether the feature was enabled, we would have to have access to the person’s email to begin with. So the two-factor allegation is unproven — although we wouldn’t be surprised.
More provable was the lack of a simple security layer that asks anyone trying to reset an account’s password for a piece of personal information: email address or phone number, for instance. (You should enable this.)
The accounts had not enabled this either earlier this week, which meant that anyone could ask to reset an account and be rewarded with the first two letters of the account’s associated email, and the domain if it was a common one. Which it was.
The risk here is that, armed with an email address (often easily guessable based on a few clues like these), and sans two-factor authentication, an attacker has a pretty decent chance of getting into that account and getting access to the Presidential Twitter. This, by the way, is also Twitter’s fault: revealing even partly redacted account information to anyone who asks for it is very poor practice.
Lastly, in perhaps the most face-palmingly ridiculous security stumble of all, Press Secretary Sean Spicer appears to have tweeted his own password , although it may also have been a pocket tweet, since no one managed to log in with it.
All in all not a good start for an administration ostensibly serious about the cyber, although the gaps in the fence all appear to have been fixed at this point.

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Dalia , a Berlin-based startup that gathers real-time market and opinion data by pushing micro-surveys to smartphone users, has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors Wellington Partners, and IBB-Bet.
In an era where polling companies are having something of an existential crisis, Dalia is attempting to use tech and, specifically, mobile distribution to improve the accuracy of market and opinion data research.
It does this through better reach and scale, afforded by distributing its surveys primarily via mobile ads that reside in third party apps and on mobile publishers’ websites, and a smarter UX that sees it do things like shorten or adapt a particular survey if it detects a participant is about to bail before completion.
In a call with Balderton’s Suranga Chandratillake, he positioned Dalia as solving a “fundamental issue” in society right now, which is the need to understand data around what people think, and why they take certain actions.
“Twenty-sixteen is perhaps the best possible example of how out of touch we are,” says the VC. “Every pollster in the world got Brexit wrong, got the U. S. election wrong, and could well be heading towards getting the French and German elections wrong this year”.
The reason, argues Chandratillake, is that market research and polling companies traditionally use techniques that don’t reach enough people, don’t ask the right questions, and don’t give a full enough view of why people make the decisions they do.
In contrast, he says that Dalia has cracked these problems by using smart phones and mobile distribution — meaning it is able to access audiences that are hard to reach, such as younger people and those in developing countries — and by providing a user interface that is “better at getting people to provide information in a quick, fun, and straightforward way”.
Since launching in 2013, Dalia claims it has generated over a billion answers from people across 96 different countries on topics ranging from brand perception to “macroeconomic sentiment”.
The startup’s customers include leading research agencies and organizations, including Nielsen, Ipsos and Kantar/WPP, in addition to think tanks and NGOs, such as UNICEF, Stanford University, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the European Council on Foreign Relations.

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