“They did a very poor job,” US President Donald Trump said of Democrat cyber security measures. “They could’ve had hacking defense, which we had.”
Yet it seems the Republican strategy is not so good either, as the recently named Cyber Security Advisor to Trump, Rudy Giuliani, along with 13 other White House appointees, have just been hacked and their passwords leaked, according to a Channel 4 investigation.
The passwords are available online and were obtained following major hacks of social media networks such as LinkedIn and MySpace from 2012 to 2016. The victims used weak passwords to secure their accounts and, even worse, reused them multiple times for other websites, leaving them vulnerable to hackers.
A significant number of Trump’s staff has been hacked in the past, including the Secretary for the Interior, the Secretary for Labor, the Press Secretary, the Director of the Domestic Policy Council, the Director of the National Trade Council, the Head of Social Media, the Chief Trade Negotiator and the Director of Oval Office.
Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lt Gen Michael Flynn, is also a victim of a cyberattack that exposed his passwords online.
The news that the former mayor of New York City would take over cyber security at the White House was widely discussed and criticized by cyber security experts, as Giuliani’s own website proved to be full of exploitable security flaws making him not a very convincing candidate.
