Unknown individuals temporarily defaced the official campaign website of President Donald Trump with a cryptocurrency scam.
Twitter user Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler was among the first to spot the defacement, which is believed to have occurred at around 16:00 PST on October 27.
https://twitter.com/ggreschler/status/1321225292837367809
As reported by
TechCrunch, the individuals responsible for the incident produced a parody of the FBI's "This site has been seized" notice on donaldjtrump.com.
The attackers wrote in their message that “the world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump” and that “it is time to allow the world to know truth.”
Claiming to have obtained "full access to trump and relatives,” acquired access to the “most internal and secret conversations strictly classified information” and learned the "origin of the corona virus," the defacers provided two Monero addresses. They invited visitors to donate to one or the other depending on whether they wanted the allegedly stolen information released to the public.
Those responsible for the defacement said that they would ultimately compare the totals received by the two Monero addresses and act according to whichever address received the highest amount in donations.
The President's campaign website returned to its original state a few minutes after people began noticing the defacement.
Tim Murtaugh, director of communications for President Trump, confirmed the incident shortly thereafter.
https://twitter.com/TimMurtaugh/status/1321242876400046087
News of this incident arrived approximately one week after President Trump said "nobody gets hacked" during an event on his campaign trail in Arizona. He went on to say, "To get hacked you need somebody with 197 IQ and he needs about 15 percent of your password," as reported by TechCrunch
at the time.
Those comments came several years after Trump Hotels
investigated a credit card data breach and then
again less than a year later.
They also made news just a few days before a security researcher announced that they had succeeded in cracking into the President's Twitter account, a claim which
Twitter has since denied.
