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Dutch police have decided not to prosecute Victor Gevers, a hacker and cybersecurity expert who managed to hack the Twitter account of US President Donald Trump twice in the span of six years. The jury decided the acquittal because Gevers would have acted “ethically”, with the aim of showing the problems to the security of the account and without malicious intent.
Gevers claims that he was able to log into Trump’s account twice, in both cases with a simple and unsophisticated method, without performing a cyberattack: he guessed the password. The first time in 2016, when he entered Donald Trump’s account with the password “yourefired”, the phrase that made Trump famous when he was the star of the reality show. The newbie. However, the Dutch authorities confirmed only the second violation, committed on October 16 this year: in that case, after only five attempts, Gevers was able to guess the password again, which was “maga2020!” (MAGA stands for Make America Great Again, Trump’s election slogan.)
– Read also: For the first time, Twitter reported a tweet from Trump
In theory, Gevers could have accessed several of the president’s confidential data, including his private conversations on Twitter. However, according to the Dutch authorities, Gevers did not take advantage of this access and in fact made his violation public immediately, with posts on Twitter, showing that his intention was to demonstrate the lack of security of the presidential account. “We believe that the hacker entered Trump’s Twitter account, but met the criteria defined by law to be considered an ethical hacker,” the Dutch prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
In the world of hackers and cybersecurity experts, it is quite common to look for security holes and then disclose and fix them. In Trump’s case, there was no explicit failure, the password was simply very easy to guess and the account was not activated with two-factor authentication, a method that increases its security.
Both Twitter and the White House have denied that Trump’s account was hacked, as claimed by the Dutch authorities.
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