His old password was literally “maga2020!”
According to a court in the Netherlands, Donald Trump had his Twitter account hacked after someone correctly guessed his password.
When signing up to any social media network, you’re given a set of instructions to help you set up a secure, new password. These instructions may include:
- Numbers in place of letters
- Special characters (such as @!#)
- A phrase people won’t easily guess
Trump didn’t heed this advice though. His old Twitter password was quite literally maga2020!Â
‘Make America Great Again’ is a slogan synonymous with the incumbent President.
His account was also bereft of two-factor authorisation, which requires a computer-generated code once you’ve made it through the password stage.
Donald Trump’s Twitter account was not very secure. (Photo: Getty)The details came to light when a 44-year-old Dutch man was taken to court in the Netherlands accused of hacking Trump’s account.
Victor Gevers (the man behind the hack) was standing trial accused of accessing Trump’s Twitter account. He faced a potential jail sentence, but the court ruled he had acted ‘ethically’ by immediately informing Dutch authorities what he had done.
A statement released by the Dutch public prosecutor read: “We believe the hacker has actually penetrated Trump’s Twitter account, but has met the criteria that have been developed in case law to go free as an ethical hacker.”
Both the US government and Twitter have said there was no evidence of Trump’s account having been hacked, although the court in the Netherlands disagreed.
Gevers won’t face any penalty for accessing Trump’s account. His argument was that he was testing the security of high-profile social media users ahead of the US presidential election – just in case someone was to hack into them for malicious purposes.
Trump, who lost in the US election to Joe Biden, was recently voted ‘Loser of the Year’ by German news magazine Der Spiegel.
The announcement was made on the same day TIME Magazine awarded its prestigious ‘Person of the Year’ award to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
In Der Spiegel’s article entitled ‘Der Verlierer des Jahres’ (The Loser of the Year), the author describes Donald Trump as “a man who … was never concerned with the common good, but always with one thing – himself”.
