San Francisco: The White House and Twitter have denied that a Dutch cybersecurity researcher broke into his account using the password ‘maga2020!’
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere told The Verge: “This is absolutely not true but we don’t comment on security procedures around the President’s social media accounts.”
According to reports on Thursday, Victor Gevers, a security researcher at the GDI Foundation and chair of the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure, said that he guessed the US President’s account password and was successful on the fifth attempt.
Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant and magazine Vrij Nederland first reported the news, citing screenshots and interviews with the researcher.
“After logging in, he emailed US-CERT to disclose the security lapse,” the report said.
Gevers said Trump’s Twitter password was changed shortly after.
Trump’s account was not protected by two-factor authentication, thus granting Gevers access to the President’s account.
A Twitter spokesperson said: “We’ve seen no evidence to corroborate this claim, including from the article published in the Netherlands today”.
“We 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”.
Vrij Nederland claimed that Gevers was responsible for a strange tweet sent by Trump on October 16.
The tweet cited the satirical publication The Babylon Bee in an apparently serious capacity.
This is the second time that Gevers has claimed to gain access to Trump’s Twitter account.
In 2016, Gevers said he and two others extracted and cracked Trump’s password as “yourefired”.
