Owen Smith, the Labour leadership contender and wannabe Prime Minister, has revealed a shocking lack of good cyber security sense
You might argue that Owen Smith has good reason to be insecure, given that his rival, Jeremy Corbyn, looks set to win a landslide victory in the Labour leadership election. Politics aside, you might also take the insecurity tag literally. Over the weekend, his campaign team tweeted a photo of Smith at a meeting. Unfortunately, the photo included a clear view of a whiteboard containing a login URL, username and password for everyone to see.
It turns out that the login was for the campaign phone bank system. Although the image was soon deleted, and the password changed, it highlights some worrying problems for Smith. This is the man that wants to be our next Prime Minister. Yet not only was a login written on a whiteboard, with a naively simple password, the whole shebang was posted to Twitter and his 16,127 followers. It could have been worse; Owen Smith could have been as popular as Jeremy Corbyn who has 625,000 followers. Seriously though, what could and should Smith have done differently?
Stupid is as stupid does. Smith has proved himself to be less than competent throughout his leadership challenge. From stating that he was pro-austerity on the couch with Angela Eagle, guaranteed to go down well with Labour members that, through to his sexist and homophobic remarks since. That his campaign team, which you have to assume he is in control of, do not have even the most basic of grasps on cybersecurity does not surprise me at all. I’m not a Corbyn supporter, but Smith makes him look like more of a leader and not less if you ask me.
Hi Peter. What worries me most of all is that an MP who wants to lead his party, lead his country even, is so keen to be seen as au fait with social media like his leadership campaign rival that he forgets the obvious security implications of what he is doing. Transfer that away from the ‘doesn’t really matter that much’ of party leadership campaigns and polling/analytics into the ‘matters a whole fecking lot’ of the bigger national security picture and it moves beyond stupid. Thanks for your comment, always good to know that people other than spammers are reading 🙂