Paul Manafort's email password was likely 'Bond007'

Trumpland spun into a frenzy early October 30 as former campaign chief Paul Manafort was charged with money laundering and tax fraud. The indictment contained several juicy tidbits about Manafort's alleged transgressions, but perhaps the most ridiculous addition to the hubristic tale was to be found elsewhere. Specifically, on Twitter.

You see, it turns out that Paul Manafort's email password was probably "Bond007." Yeah, like James Bond. And hell, this may stillbe his email password.

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How do we know that the man who was most certainly a target of foreign intelligence services used such a ludicrous password? Manafort, like many of us, is not immune to the cybersecurity follies of major corporations. In 2013, Adobe suffered a major hack, which exposed a total of 130 million passwords. A quick search of ';--have i been pwned?, a site that lets you know if accounts associated with specific email addresses have been hacked, shows that an account purportedly belonging to Manafort ([email protected]) was indeed breached.

Credit: ';--have i been pwned?

The contents of the Adobe breach were available online at the time (and still are, if you want to dig around for the torrent), and a conversation on Twitter involving noted cybersecurity expert The Grugq and someone who claims to have access to the Adobe data led to this facepalm of a revelation:

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

In the meantime, the user behind z3dster had taken to Twitter to show his work. 

Tweet may have been deleted

We reached out to z3dster for confirmation, and he was quick to note that "this was all done offline."

"I want to be clear I never touched anyones data or attempted to touch anything behind a password screen," he wrote to Mashable. "[That] would be criminally stupid."

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Self-described "password hashing enthusiast" Royce Williams also hopped in to say that he "independently confirmed that at least one of those passwords was exactly what @z3dster said it is."

Tweet may have been deleted

When reached over Twitter DM, Williams noted that Manafort's supposed email account was also associated with a 2012 Dropbox breach, and that he had been able to determine the password via that data.

"Yep, the Dropbox one was 'bond007' (note the lower-case 'b'), associated with '[email protected],'" wrote Williams. "Perhaps Adobe required at least one capital letter at the time, not sure."

If these two individuals are correct, Manafort appears to have been using a minor variation of the same password for two completely different accounts. Someone dumb enough to reuse a variation of "Bond007" across multiple services would likely not have been shy about using it for his email account as well.

Perhaps this was in The Grugq's mind when he tweeted that "Bond007" was in fact Manafort's email password — sparking hundreds of retweets in the process.

Tweet may have been deleted

For legal reasons, Mashable did not attempt to login into Manafort's account — however, as the Adobe breach occurred in 2013 and the Dropbox breach went down on 2012, the ex-campaign chief would have likely changed it by now anyway (one hopes).

But then again, anyone who believes "Bond007" is a secure combination of numbers and letters probably doesn't practice the best digital hygiene.

This story has been updated to include comment from z3dster.

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