New York:
US President Donald Trump‘s campaign website was briefly hacked on Tuesday, just a week before the presidential elections. The spokesman for the Trump campaign, Tim Murtaugh, said in a statement that the website was “defaced.” “We are working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack. There was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is actually stored on the site. The website has been restored,” Murtaugh said.
A report in The New York Times said Trump’s campaign website was briefly taken over by hackers and the hack lasted less than 30 minutes. The paper said in a screen posted to Trump’s website – donaldjtrump.com – the hackers claimed to have compromised “multiple devices” that gave them access to the president and his relatives “most internal and secret conversations,” including classified information.
The hackers also accused the Trump administration of having a hand in the origins of the coronavirus and cooperating with “foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections.” The NYT added that the hackers appeared to be looking to generate cryptocurrency and invited visitors to donate cryptocurrency to one of two funds – ‘Yes, share the data’ and the other labeled ‘No, Do not share the data’. “After the deadline, we will compare the funds and execute the will of the world,” the hackers wrote, without specifying a deadline. The hackers also posted what they said was their encryption key to Trumps’ campaign site.
With less than a week left for the elections, the defacement highlighted cybersecurity risks facing the election campaigns. The report said intelligence agencies have been closely monitoring hacking groups, including teams backed by Iran and Russia, that have tried to break into election-related systems and have been involved in influence operations in recent weeks.
Last week, the director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe had identified Iran and Russia as two nations responsible for disinformation and some limited intrusions into voter registration databases. Trump last week told a campaign rally in Arizona that “Nobody gets hacked. To get hacked you need somebody with 197 I.Q. and he needs about 15 percent of your password.”
