Hackers Invade New Trump Site Almost Immediately

Truth Social platform bombarded with fake accounts, pics of defecating pigs
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 22, 2021 9:26 AM CDT
Hackers Invade New Trump Site Almost Immediately
In this July 7, 2021, file photo, former President Donald Trump speaks at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ.   (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

Donald Trump created Truth Social to "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech," but the former president's new social media platform doesn't have the legs yet to stand up to hackers. Just a couple of hours after Trump on Wednesday introduced Truth Social and its parent company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, someone breached a private version of the still-to-be-launched social media site. They went to town, first creating a fake "donaldjtrump" account, then setting up even more not-real handles under the names of Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, and Twitter's own Jack Dorsey, reports the New York Times.

From there, the hackers went the scatological route, posting profane rants that targeted Dorsey, as well as photos of defecating pigs. Claiming responsibility for the breach: the infamous hacking collective Anonymous, with members telling the Times the move was part of their "online war against hate." "We had a fun time trolling it to high heaven," one hacker says. Mikael Thalen of the Daily Dot talked to a representative from the group, who told him they sussed out the name of a developer involved in the project then used the Shodan search engine to do some digging.

Not long after, they found a web domain "that appeared to be running the mobile beta for Truth Social." Thalen himself demonstrated how easy it was to infiltrate the site, setting himself up as donaldtrump. Truth Social eventually caught on to what was happening and took the domain offline. This hack comes just days after Trump's regular DonaldJTrump.com site was breached, apparently by a Turkish "hacktivist" who embedded a nationalist video of controversial President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reports Gizmodo. (More Truth Social stories.)

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