Hegseths Personal Phone Use Created Vulnerabilities, Analysts Say

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March, potentially exposing national security secrets to foreign adversaries.The phone number could be found in a variety of places, including WhatsApp, Facebook and a fantasy sports site.It was the same number through which the defense secretary, using the Signal commercial messaging app, disclosed flight data for American strikes on the Houthi militia in Yemen.Cybersecurity analysts said an American defense secretary’s communications device would usually be among the most protected national security assets.“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in an interview.

“He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”Emily Harding, a defense and security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, added: “You just don’t want the secretary of defense’s phone number to be out there and available to anyone.”The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, did not respond to request for comment.Mr.Hegseth’s use of Signal to convey details of military strikes in Yemen first surfaced last month when the editor of The Atlantic wrote an article that said he had been added, apparently accidentally, to an encrypted chat among senior U.S.

government officials.The New York Times reported this week that Mr.

Hegseth included sensitive information about the strikes in a Signal group chat he set up that included his wife and brother, among others.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe f...