June 5th, 2012Top Story

Well, it Looks Like Someone Hacked Into Mitt Romney's Private Email

 By John Cook

Everything old is new again: A tipster has emailed Gawker claiming to have hacked into Mitt Romney's private email and DropBox accounts.

You will recall that roughly four years ago, 4Chan hackers got into Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account, releasing a few private emails, photos, and her contact list. The lesson: If you're running for national office, don't use a private email that lets anyone reset the password if they can guess the city you were born in.

Mitt Romney apparently hasn't learned that lesson. According to a raft of old emails from his days as governor of Massachusetts released today by the Wall Street Journal, Romney used the address "mittromney@hotmail.com" to communicate with his staff as recently as 2006. According to this Associated Press story, the Hotmail account was still active as of March 2012.

And according to the tipster who claims to have hacked into it by guessing Romney's favorite pet in response to a "security" questions, it's still active today: