She tweeted top secret code: This is Europe’s most reckless minister – foreign policy

Embarrassing becomes dangerous …

That conference was TOP SECRET. Nevertheless, a journalist could easily log into the switch of the EU defense ministers on Friday. The reason: a stupid misstake a Dutch minister!

Who is this woman who is actually considered a cyber specialist?

Review: The defense minister of the Netherlands Ank Bijleveld tweeted a photo of the secret EU defense ministers conference that is about to begin. It shows: five of the six digits of the access code for the zoom ministers’ meeting.

A journalist from the Dutch TV station RTL Nieuws simply tried digits one to ten for the last part of the access code and finally got through. The scandal was perfect. “RTL Nieuws” dialed into the secret meeting, journalist Daniël Verlaan waved and greeted everyone involved in a friendly manner.

“You’d better log out quickly before the police get to you,” said the not at all pleased EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell to the Dutch reporter. “Bye-bye” was the answer of the journalists. The meeting was canceled shortly thereafter.

It was an employee’s mistake, the Dutch Ministry of Defense said shortly afterwards. But that his boss, Defense Minister Bijleveld, let him tweet completely unsupervised, also seems implausible.

Bijleveld is actually considered a cyber specialist

Who is the woman who made this embarrassing mistake, which could have had dangerous consequences if, for example, a foreign secret service and not a waving journalist had been watching the confidential meeting?

Ank Bijleveld – with full name Anna Theodora Bernardina Bijleveld-Schouten – has been a member of Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s third cabinet since 2017. The politician from the small town of IJsselmuiden (12,500 inhabitants), born in 1962, is married and has two children.

Bitter: Internet security and cyber defense are among the minister’s specialties, who have now revealed her secret access code via Twitter.

As early as 2018 she (politically) led an operation by the Dutch secret service against Russian spies who had tried to use special equipment to hack into the WLAN of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. The plan was thwarted, the rented Citroën with the espionage equipment was confiscated and all four Kremlin agents were expelled from the country, as Ank Bijleveld announced at the time.

Since then, at the latest, the 58-year-old has been considered to be particularly sensitive and an expert on cyber security. It was only eleven days ago, on November 10th, that she gave a lecture on the subject in the digital presence of the German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. In her contribution to the CODE conference on cybersecurity, Bijleveld “devotes herself, among other things, to the question of how the EU’s resilience to threats from the Internet can be strengthened”, shared https://twitter.com/BMVg_Bundeswehr/status/1326203702735147008 after the conference with.

Tweeting top secret passwords is certainly not one of them.