Donald Trump's Twitter account is secured using a personal Gmail address that could be hacked

Mr Trump criticised Hillary Clinton throughout the election for using a private email server, since it could compromise important documents

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to the crowd at a fundraising event (EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/AFP/Getty Images)

Donald Trump's Twitter could easily be hacked because of mistakes he has made with the account, experts have warned.

The @POTUS account, which is owned by Mr Trump but run by his team, is registered to a personal email address of a staffer in defiance of both cyber security and legal protocol. It comes after Mr Trump spent much of the election warning about the insecurity of private email systems, and amid warnings that the official accounts could be a national security concern.

Anyone with access to that private Gmail account could in turn request the password for the @POTUS account. If they got it, they would be able to post any information they liked onto perhaps the most important Twitter feed in the world.

Mr Trump's staff have already been warned by hackers that they need to change the settings of the official accounts, which include @FLOTUS and @VP as well as Mr Trump's, for fear that they may be hacked if they don't. One hacker – WauchulaGhost, who has hacked into more than 500 Isis Twitter accounts – told CNN that it would be easy to break into all of those accounts within minutes because of the email settings.

"All I have to do is guess the email. Which I have been rather good at doing," WauchulaGhost told CNN. "Then verify the email exists. At that point take the email account, reset Twitter password, boom.... I own the Pres. Not saying I'm going to.. haha. But it's rather easy for some."

Cyber security experts pointed out that the Presidential account probably has more security settings enabled, and may even have special systems that aren't available to normal Twitter users. But they pointed out that even giving out the email associated with an account – especially if that address is hosted on another service, like Google's – is one way that hackers can gain access to a person's private information.

Alex Wall, who is the director of social media for Hillary Clinton and ran Barack Obama's official accounts, branded Mr Trump's Twitter practises "insanely irresponsible".

Twitter only shows the first two characters of a person's email account, and so it's impossible to know for sure who the Gmail address belongs to. But it looks likely that it is owned by Dan Scavino, who is Mr Trump's assistant and has the title of "director of social media".

Mr Trump has also been criticised for reportedly hanging on to his Android phone to tweet on, despite warnings from security services that doing so compromises national security.