A DUTCH ETHICAL COMPUTER hacker and cybersecurity expert claims to have logged into the personal Twitter account of United States President Donald Trump, reportedly after guessing his password.
The hacker, Victor Gevers, took
several screenshots of the private interface of Trump’s Twitter account,
and shared them with Dutch news media, before contacting US authorities
to notify them of the breach.
Trump attributes much of his
popularity and electoral success to social media, and is especially fond
of Twitter as a means of communication. He has tweeted nearly 20,000
times since 2015 (including re-tweets), with at least 6,000 of those
tweets appearing in 2020 alone. His personal account, which uses the
moniker @realDonaldTrump, has almost 90 million followers.
But Gevers, a self-described ethical
computer hacker, cybersecurity researcher and activist, said he was able
to guess the American president’s password and log into his Twitter
account after four failed attempts. The hacker claims that Trump’s
password was “maga2020!”. According to Gevers, Trump’s account did not
require a two-factor authentication log-in process, which usually
requires a password coupled with a numeric code that is sent to a user’s
mobile telephone. As a result, Gevers said he was able to access
Trump’s private messages on Twitter and —had he wanted to— post tweets
in the name of the US president. He could also change Trump’s profile
image, had he chosen to do so.
The Dutch hacker took several screenshots of the webpages he was able to access and emailed them to Volkskrant, a Dutch daily newspaper, and Vrij Nederland, an investigative monthly magazine. Shortly after accessing Trump’s account, Gevers said
he contacted the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which
operates under the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency. He said the US president’s password was
changed “shortly after”, and that he was then contacted by the US Secret
Service.
Also on Thursday, a Twitter spokesman
said the company’s security team had seen “no evidence to corroborate”
Gevers’ claim. He added that the San Francisco, California-based social
media company had “proactively implemented account security measures for
a designated group of high-profile, election-related Twitter accounts
in the United States, including federal branches of government”. Such
measures included “strongly” encouraging such accounts to enable
two-factor authentication, said the spokesman. But he did not specify
whether Trump’s account had activated this feature. The White House also
denied Gevers’ claim, calling it “absolutely not true” and adding that
it would “not comment on security procedures around the president’s
social media accounts”.