Trump campaign website is defaced by hackers

President Donald Trump’s campaign website was briefly taken over and defaced by hackers Tuesday.

>> Nicole PerlrothThe New York Times
Published : 28 Oct 2020, 04:38 AM
Updated : 28 Oct 2020, 04:38 AM

It lasted less than 30 minutes, but the incident came as both campaigns, as well as law enforcement and intelligence agencies, have been on high alert for digital interference before next week’s election.

In a statement, Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said it was “working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack.” He added, “There was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is actually stored on the site. The website has been restored.”

The FBI did not immediately comment.

It was not clear whether the defacement was the work of foreign hackers or cybercriminals. But in a screed posted to Trump’s website — donaldjtrump.com — the hackers claimed to have compromised “multiple devices” that gave them access to the “most internal and secret conversations” of the president and his relatives, including classified information.

The hackers also accused the Trump administration, without proof, of having a hand in the origins of the coronavirus and cooperating with “foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections.”

The hackers appeared to be looking to generate cryptocurrency. They invited visitors to donate cryptocurrency to one of two funds — one labelled “Yes, share the data,” the other labelled “No, Do not share the data.” They solicited payments in Monero, a hard-to-trace cryptocurrency.

“After the deadline, we will compare the funds and execute the will of the world,” they wrote, without specifying a deadline. The hackers also posted what they said was their encryption key, ostensibly to verify that whatever information they posted came from them. The key corresponded to an email address at a nonexistent internet site.

Though the defacement appeared to be part of a common cryptocurrency scam to get people to irreversibly donate money online, the incident took on added urgency one week before the election. Cybersecurity experts said that it could have been caused by tricking a website administrator into turning over the credentials, in what is known as a phishing attack, or by redirecting the campaign website to the hacker’s own server.

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, Trump told a campaign rally in Tucson, Arizona, “Nobody gets hacked. To get hacked you need somebody with 197 IQ and he needs about 15% of your password.”

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