Victor Gevers, a Dutch hacker, was able to break into President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on October 16, 2020, by using the password 'maga2020!' according to reports. To prove his feat, he shared a screenshot with the Dutch outlet, Vrij Nederland (VN), showing the edit profile dialog box where he could have changed Trump’s display name, profile picture, and cover image.
There were two astounding details about the breach; the first was that it only took Gevers seven attempts to guess the correct password, the other was that there was no two-factor authentication enabled to tighten up security on the account.
Luckily for Trump, Victor Gevers is an ethical hacker so rather than deface or steal data from the account, which he could have done, he sent an email to Trump to inform him that he had managed to hack the account; this is known as responsible disclosure. If Gevers had malicious intent, he could have downloaded the president's data file which includes all information including deleted direct messages.
At the time of writing, Vrij Nederland has reached out to Twitter to ask why the account of such a well-known figure is not protected with more security. It said that the social media firm had not responded to those queries yet.
Source: Vrij Nederland (Dutch)
Update Dec 17th: this has since been confirmed to be true, President Trump's Twitter account was hacked, but the US and Dutch authorities are not pursuing criminal charges since the hack was deemed "responsible" or "ethical" with the immediate disclosure to the U.S. Secret Service.
Source: The Guardian.
90 Comments - Add comment