Dutch Prosecutors Find a Hacker Did Successfully Log Into Donald Trump's Twitter Account (bbc.com) 96
Dutch prosecutors have found a hacker did successfully log in to Donald Trump's Twitter account by
guessing his password -- "MAGA2020!" From a report: But they will not be punishing Victor Gevers, who was acting "ethically." Mr Gevers shared what he said were screenshots of the inside of Mr Trump's account on 22 October, during the final stages of the US presidential election. But at the time, the White House denied it had been hacked and Twitter said it had no evidence of it. Mr Gevers said he was very happy with the outcome. "This is not just about my work but all volunteers who look for vulnerabilities in the internet," he said. The well respected cyber-security researcher said he had been conducting a semi-regular sweep of the Twitter accounts of high-profile US election candidates, on 16 October, when he had guessed President Trump's password.
Not the combination to my luggage (Score:5, Funny)
> "MAGA2020!"
Definitely not the combination to my luggage!
Re:Not the combination to my luggage (Score:5, Funny)
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You must've forgotten to check Joe Manchin's account.
Re: Not the combination to my luggage (Score:2)
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I know you can't stand it; Trump is once again one step ahead of you. He knows sooner or later he will slip up and post something that would not play right with his base.
Using a crappy password is a great hedge. He could always claim his account was hacked, and once his password was revealed, embarrassing though it might be better politically that whatever might have outraged his supporters.
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and replace the 17th with what
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Sounds like 3D chess, but "He who need not be named" still hasn't figured out how to flip a coin properly.
Re:Not the combination to my luggage (Score:5, Funny)
Mr President, sir, I have some bad news. Your Twitter account has been compromised.
This is really bad! Do something about it, or you're fired! How did you find out?
Well, sir, there was a series of tweets that were somewhat out of character.
What do you mean, out of character?
They were written in good English, sir, by someone who did not appear to be a petulant five-year-old kid.
You're fired!
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Trump’s new password is I WON THE ELECTION!
Blame the con artist (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing he does keep secure are his bank records to hide his money laundering. Fortunately, judges keep telling him he has to hand over such documents, among others [cnn.com], for the New York AG to look at after Michael Cohen informed courts the con artist may be committing fraud.
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The only thing he does keep secure are his bank records to hide his money laundering. Fortunately, judges keep telling him he has to hand over such documents, among others [cnn.com], for the New York AG to look at after Michael Cohen informed courts the con artist may be committing fraud.
He does not. People do that for him. One of the few "nice" things about USA fraud statutes is that it takes very little for them to get a nice RICO icing on top. Then both the initiator (Trump) and all the ones who helped him get the Alcatras treatment.
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Not sure I'd refer to him as an 'artist', he's more of a laborer.
Re: Blame the con artist (Score:2)
I'm not sure I'd even call him a laborer. Has he ever performed actual labor in his life? Con-man is succinct and apt.
I don't approve of hacking, but (Score:5, Funny)
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At least the hacker didn't post something idiotic that would embarrass the President.
Well... his posts were in Dutch, but no one noticed -- just thought it was another covfefe [wikipedia.org] day for Trump ... :-)
Re: I don't approve of hacking, but (Score:2)
Excuse me, but I did that joke better, the last time. :)
(Still appreciated. :)
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At least the hacker didn't post something idiotic that would embarrass the President.
Posting something idiotic that would embarrass President Trump is the main duty and job function of Donald Trump. He is perfectly capable of doing that without any external help or assistance.
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At least the hacker didn't post something idiotic that would embarrass the President.
Posting something idiotic that would embarrass President Trump is the main duty and job function of Donald Trump. He is perfectly capable of doing that without any external help or assistance.
LOL, Just wait until Joe does his tweets. Mr. Gaff himself.
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maybe the most impressive thing (Score:5, Insightful)
about Trump is by the time he's set the bar for ineptness, another day brings new news to set a new one
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This is America. We pay our politicians to be inept. Inept and ineffective is a million times better than inept and malicious. Unfortunately, we don't get the choice of not inept when it comes to federal votes. It's built into the entire system.
Re:maybe the most impressive thing (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not American, but my feet rest on Earth. So I have a dog in this one, just a much smaller dog than an American would have.
Biden's stutter and age do hinder his ability to give rousing speeches, but his recent actions, particularly the appointments being announced, show that he is razor sharp. The only appointment that I can come up with anything to criticize is retired general Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense, just because I'd rather a civilian be in that position, as is usually the case historically. With that exception Biden's picks are excellent. He's putting decent and well-qualified people in charge. Even if he does fail, he doesn't seem to have any problems delegating the decisions to the qualified people he surrounds himself with.
Compare that to Trump. You can't. This isn't Dumb or Dumber. It's Qualified and Competent versus Shockingly Corrupt and Supremely Ineffective. Trump divisive politics set the stage for COVID-19 to run rough-shod across a country unwillingly to trust expert opinion, and his actions to deny/cover-up/minimize the problem just fueled the spread. That is one issue that Trump screwed up. Just one. The two candidates are light-years apart. The impact of those differences is already starting to show.
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Biden's picks are excellent, if you're a Wall Streeter, bankster, or work in the war industries, not so much for anyone else. I suppose that was to be expected, but it's still disappointing to the people who held their noses and voted against the orangutan.
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particularly the appointments being announced, show that he is razor sharp.
You realize his 'people' identify those people for him right, and in most cases not even his people, but rather various liberal leaning think tanks that donated to his campaign.
You also realize that most of them are Obama admin retreads not even slotted into there former areas of expertise, err go most jobs according to political favors.
The exceptions to the above make even less sense.
Biden's picks are excellent. He's putting decent and well-qualified people in charge.
Pete Buttigieg good example. Sure he has some fancy degrees (not in civil engineering mind you) and executive experience but
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Very nice example of the False Equivalence Fallacy. Biden has been in politics for half a century. That means he's won multiple elections. He was VP for eight years, meaning he was on a winning national ticket twice.
Let's compare that to Donald Trump, who won by the margins of error in a few key states, lost the popular vote by over two million votes in 2016.
I don't pretend Biden is any Einstein, but he's hardly an idiot, and we can expect that we won't get multiple tweets a day; some just plain whining, so
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Did he pick the launch codes too? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Trump is simply taking everything to the extreme. Everyone rules by "polling and public opinion" at present. Nobody actually tries to govern and look at where his country should be going.
Re: Did he pick the launch codes too? (Score:2)
Why do you keep putting the spotlight on him then?
Or do you think that is totally him too?
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Breaking news: America did nothing today that invoked laughter on the world stage, comedy futures fall to an all time low. More at 11.
A guessable password and no 2FA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? A prominent account that you *know* is going to be a target. And you have a guessable passwrod and no 2FA in place?
I'm sure the Whitehouse has IT security people. This is kind of pathetic...
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2. I am even less surprised that a claim about hacking by USA government supported by their security services has been proven patently false in the court of law. Pity it does not happen more often.
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What I'm not sure about is how effective those will be if the biggest security risk is a learning resistant human error. After all, according to how Donald Trump presents himself to the public, he is someone who thinks himself to be more knowledgeable than any expert on any given topic.
Re: A guessable password and no 2FA? (Score:2)
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Remember when Obama came into office he was told that he could no longer use his personal Blackberry, which annoyed the president but he followed the rules. Trump likely was told that a private Twitter account also should not be used (or a private email server as well), and he said "I'm the leader of the free world, you can't tell me what to do! Besides, I will pardon myself." Trump has always ignored the rules, even before he became president.
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Oh, remember when Hillary stepped into the state department and was told to use official email, and she refused?
When she was told to not use personal devices, and instead used several?
When she was told she couldn't bring her cellphone into a SCIF, but did anyways?
Yeah, that was back when no one cared what government officials did, because Obama was President.
Re:A guessable password and no 2FA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh sure, people did care. They've been whining about it for twelves years straight. It cost her the White House.
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He was told he couldn't use his blackberry because it wasn't hardened. They did the same thing with Trump. Trump unlike Obama follows the rules and court decisions. He's been very good about that.
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Ha! Trump is the one proposing to bypass rules and court decisions with regards to the elections. He certainly ingored rules about emoluments. There are rules for government officers regarding how private communication accounts may be used, and Trump definitely used Twitter for what appeared to be official communications. Trump for many decades, or his whole life, has not been a rule follower and has found ways to skirt, bypass, or ignore rules and regulations.
Re: A guessable password and no 2FA? (Score:2)
Are you going to tell the president he's fixing his security now or else? (Or else, what, anyway?)
Also, I don't think he told them the password.
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White House security people do whatever the frack they're told. They "lost" 21 million emails for the Shrub Madministration (supposedly with no backups), let Rice and Powell use webmail accounts for State Department business, and permitted Clinton to hook her home email server to the State Department's so that she could continue to use her insecure Crackberry.
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What a stupid, easily-disprovable lie.
Here's a reasonable news report of the event: https://www.jacksonville.com/r... [jacksonville.com]
And here's the salient point:
In December 2009, however, the Obama administration reported that it had recovered roughly 22 million Bush administration emails from 2003-2005. The emails had been mislabeled, not deleted. A settlement negotiated between CREW and the National Security Archives and the Obama administration, which inherited the lawsuits, allowed for the release of 94 days worth of emails, as trying to recover all of the lost data would have been too expensive.
The emails were mislabeled and eventually found.
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That's why I put "lost" in quotes.
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Did you really think for a moment Trump would put considerations of security over convenience ?
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This is a Twitter account, does Twitter support 2FA for user accounts?
He should have better proven he hacked it (Score:3)
Re: He should have better proven he hacked it (Score:3)
Imagine that. A completely lovely post. The aftermath would have been *hilariois*.
Were I Biden, I wouls not only pardoned him, butngiven him a medal. A new kind "for heroic comedic effort in dire times".
Trump wasn't the only one who knew the password. (Score:3)
White House social media staff sometimes post using Trump's account, so they must have known the password too. Are they all that stupid, or are they too scared to tell him the password is stupid?
Re: Trump wasn't the only one who knew the passwor (Score:2)
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What makes you so sure that Trump was not told. Iâ(TM)m sure Trump is told a lot of things that he ignores or refuses to believe. Like I am sure he was told he could not use his outdated Android phone for secure communications. And I am sure he used it anyway for years.
He is the most stable genius in the history of intelligent design so who the hell are you to question his towering intellect?
Re: Trump wasn't the only one who knew the passwor (Score:2)
Do you wanna end up at a gulag, err, "black site"?
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They probably told him, "Your password needs to have a capital letter, numbers, and a special character."
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If the password was so stupid, why did only one person guess it? And by the way, since it had 2020 in it, I have to assume he at least changed his password annually. Leon Podesta (the head of Hillary's campaign) used gmail for everything and what was his password? Oh yeah, "password". That was the magic incantation that led to the DNC email hacks.
Trump had upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters in his password - that's what most experts recommend, isn't it?
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We don't know that only one person guessed it. But since one person guessed it and reported it, we didn't see any last minute shenanigans on November 2.
I am not able laugh at all this ... (Score:2, Troll)
The Trump slate of electors in the states he lost have the same legal standing of a parliament of crows. But still, with serious demeanor they cast their vote for Trump, on camera. And they hold for a "Public Hearing in the Pennsylvania State Senate about election irregularities". The venue is not Senate Chamber, Capitol, Harrisbu
Re:I am not able laugh at all this ... (Score:4, Informative)
Its doubly evil when said executive rule making eliminates just about every detective control we have. Removes witness requirements, removes signature validation, removes address checks, directs improperly completed ballots and mailers to be 'fixed' etc.
Yet do you have any reasons to believe that fraud has occurred? All statistical analyses show that this election was pretty normal, with difference being a slightly higher turnout.
Re:I am not able laugh at all this ... (Score:4, Insightful)
He is a total party hack, does not believe in democracy as we understand it. The 17th amendment provides for the direct election of the senators. Because of this they can't use their gerry mandered state legislative districts to elect their senators. His signature shows how deeply aware he is about Republican ideology
They dont even plan to win the popular vote. They know they are so unpopular they can not win enough votes. They believe in gerrymandering state legislative districts, and thus win control of states with minority vote, and then leverage state legislature control to win the Presidency and Senate. Leverage that to appoint judges.
They believe it is entirely fair 5% of the Republicans who show up for the Republican Primaries should be able to control the remaining 95% of the population. The evil they have in their heart has no limits.
They are simultaneously "pro life" and "pro death penalty".
They want to put the government between a woman and her doctor but they want to remove all law enforcement between a gun nut and his dealer.
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Pro-life protects the innocent, pro death penalty condemns the guilty - they aren't equivalent.
We have never, ever chosen our President through a popular vote, pretending it is important is just childish.
Gerrymandering voting districts is not a uniquely Republican Party activity.
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We have never elected Presidents by popular vote. True. We never used to elect senators by statewide popular vote before 17th amendment. Why is it childish to say whats good for the state is good for the united states? Well, national popular vote compact is at 194 electoral college vote. We need just 76 more to make the entire question moot. More you push gerrymandering in Red states, more yo
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Your defense of just the normal amount of corruption is fascinating.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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They believe it was tota
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Point to anything in the real world to back up a single claim you made?
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That clearly shows what kind of person that troll is.
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Legislatures always have been allowed to delegate some decisions to officials.
No they have not. Really that only got established with CHevron and most conservatives would argue that is bad law and ought to be over turned.
There is no reason executive agencies can't help author policy documents and rules, but the legislature should have to vote to enact them. Even if they were done in Omnibus legislation a few times a year at least that would provide the legislative branch with an opportunity to object to something they found truly objectionable implemented by the rule makers.
they've claimed there was no fraud when they've always been clear that there was no widespread fraud.
and who
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It is not areacracy, our constitution did not provide for so many votes for every so many square miles.
What an idiotic statement handful of population centers can essentially trample the needs of the rest of the nation. That handful of population center is the nation, most of it anyway. Nation means people, go look it up in the Bible. The constitution does not mandate the majority to fulfill the needs of the minority. It just ha
Re:I am not able laugh at all this ... (Score:5, Interesting)
We Pennsylvanians are quite blue, tough for any Republican to win statewide offices, but still the legislature is dominated by Republicans representing 45% of PA getting the majority in State Senate, State House.
Same thing with USA. Democrats won the popular vote 7 out of 8 elections. 32 years, Of the 16 house elections, the Democratic reps represented more voters than Republicans. Democratic senators represent more voters than Republican senators. Still Republicans nominated 15 of the 19 supreme court justices, and 80% of the lower court justices in the last 32 years. 80% of the judges in USA are Republican appointees.
All the political power Republicans have is based on narrow interpretations of the letter of the law, not the spirit of democracy.
Our Union has survived civil war, at least those traitors faced in the battlefield. These Republican traitors of today are killing the Union with thousand gerrymandered cuts. With such traitors inside our borders, we don't need external enemies.
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What is this popular votefetish you Democrats have? Politically it is meaningless when electing a President, yet you keep insisting it's a meaningful metric, why?
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The voting districts drawn up politicians that gives less weight to the opinion of some voters compared to other voters violates the basic premise one-person-one-vote.
All these legislative districts are administrative conveniences. The number of offices held by each party should reflect the proportion of Americans supporting that party. When it is violated systematically over a long time, it shows the deficiency of the system.
It is f
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I don't agree with any of that. one-person-one-vote is a just a recipe for mob rule. This country is supposed to protect the rights of minorities. One-person-one-vote does exactly the opposite of that. It also means we forever doomed to be ruled by the most mediocre among us.
Nope one-person-one-vote is a idea that belongs in the waste basket. The system actually does just about what its designed to do right now. It allows those willing to make various levels of investment various degrees of voice in the p
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We will protect the rights of the minorities. Even that microscopic minority racists will have their rights protected. You will see ACLU standing up for Rush Limbaugh's privacy rights and the Klans right to hold assemblies. Yes, rights will be protected. But what you wish, what you need, even the most basic thing you need like food,
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Well the court has gone back and forth on that a bunch of times in various ways, and idea founders supported one-man-one-vote is just stupid. I am good if we want go back to land ownership as a per-requisite for being allowed to vote. I thing proving you are net-tax-payer would be a better proxy for competency today but I'll support either. I am sure the current trend of expanded voting rights will at some point reverse too,.
As to you invisible hand nonsense. Well sure i there were independent selfish acto
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16 of the last 20 actually, going back to Warren E. Burger, appointed by Nixon in 1969.
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Shut up - he took his complaints to court, how does that end democracy? He exercised his right to file cases in court, period. Stop with the Chris Hayes/Rachel Maddie dramatics - he filed a lawsuit and it was rejected, end of story.
Re:I am not able laugh at all this ... (Score:4, Informative)
They filed 51 law suits. Not one.
The Texas law suit is so weak and ridiculous, it would not even get a hearing. But 66% of the house reps and 17 attorney generals signed on as amicus. Senators leaned on GA sec of state. Violent mobs are threatening violence against election officials. And Trump is egging them all on. And you are so nonchalantly dismissive of it?
You too are hopelessly gone, punch drunk on the cool-aid.
Has Anyone Checked to See If It's Still Valid? (Score:2)
Wouldn't surprise me if it hasn't been updated.
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MAGA2024!
Sorry but I'm not buying it. (Score:3)
IMPO, Twitter's security is a bit better than this guy is claiming. Also, it's far easier to just fake a website and screenshot using the browser's developers tools. I could do that in 10 minutes. It would be a more creditable claim if he showed his DMs or actually posted something after saying what he would post out of band. Yet the article makes claims that would be possible in theory when if he really had access there is no theory about it, he could have just done it. Shame on people for just accepting a screenshot at face value, you've been duped.