Romney Campaign: Authorities Investigate Possible Email Hack
An unnamed Gawker tipster claims to have accessed the former governor's private Hotmail account.
| Posted Wednesday, June 6, 2012, at 11:23 AM
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
Authorities are looking into whether Mitt Romney's private email account was hacked, the presumptive GOP nominee's campaign said Tuesday.
Gawker reported earlier in the day that it had been approached by an anonymous tipster claiming to have accessed the former governor's Hotmail account, which has since been de-activated.
Apparently, the hacker accessed the account by guessing the answer to Romney's security question "What is your favorite pet?" The password was then changed and sent to Gawker in an email. (Against all odds, Gawker appears to have passed up a host of rather obvious Seamus jokes, leading us to believe the tipster must have beaten them to it.) The hacker also claims to have compromised Romney's Dropbox account.
With the exception of saying that authorities are investigating, the campaign isn't commenting further.
The anonymous tipster didn't include any screenshots or further verification that the account had been accessed, and Gawker apparently declined to try out the new password.
As the Associated Press points out, the email address—mittromney(at)hotmail.com—was the same used by the former governor to conduct some state business, which is the reason the address became public in the first place under Massachusetts Public Records Law. The account was active as late as March 2012, but bounced as of Tuesday.
