In yesterday’s massive attack on Twitter, some of the highest-profile accounts on the service, including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates had their accounts hijacked to peddle bitcoin scams. Notably, however, Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous Twitter user of all, was untouched by the attack, and it could be because Twitter has implemented extra protections for his account.
In a deeply-reported article on the attack, The New York Times writes that Trump’s Twitter account has extra protection after “past incidents,” citing two anonymous sources — a senior White House official and a Twitter employee. The New York Times didn’t specify what those past incidents were, but they could refer to the November 2nd, 2017 incident where a rogue employee deactivated Trump’s account on his last day at the company. Trump’s account returned to Twitter 11 minutes later.
A day after the deactivation, Twitter said it had “implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again.” The company didn’t elaborate further. But The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Twitter had already limited the number of employees who could access Trump’s account following his inauguration. Those tools typically let employees suspend or deactivate accounts, but don’t let them tweet from those accounts, the WSJ said.
Motherboard reported that the people involved in Wednesday’s attack were sharing screenshots of a Twitter admin tool apparently used for the attack. And Twitter itself has said that its own employee systems and tools were compromised. If those are also the same systems that no longer had widespread access to Trump’s account as of 2017, that could have made his account more difficult, if not impossible, to access from the admin tool used by the attackers. It’s also possible that Trump’s account was hardened further after the rogue employee deactivated it in November 2017.
Twitter hasn’t replied to a request for comment, so we can’t exactly be sure that those safeguards are what stopped the attackers from hijacking his account on Tuesday. In fact, it’s not clear that the attackers even tried. Either way, they didn’t get in, and that could have prevented an already very bad situation from getting even worse.
Comments
and yet nobody could tell
By lobotomies4free on 07.16.20 8:55pm
So there are multiple checks on all the crazy stuff he tweets and it still gets through! That’s hilarious
I think we all thought it was just solo logged in to his rogue 2001 Nokia
By Graceland4U on 07.16.20 10:52pm
More like pathetic.
By TheVergeUrge on 07.16.20 11:25pm
There are multiple checks on the Twitter back-end, not from a user login side.
By d0mth0ma5 on 07.17.20 4:38am
Good to know. If he does ever say something truly criminal there would be less deniability.
By shabanga on 07.16.20 11:32pm
He’s tweeted many things truly criminal.
By Squakerboy on 07.17.20 2:28am
Technically no, but once he’s out of office, investigations will probably reveal his many lies and obstruction, some on Twitter.
Protections or not, this should’ve been a wakeup call to Twitter and Congress that no sitting President should have access to Twitter which is still too easy to hack. No one needs to hear Trump’s tweets except Trump’s ego. He should be using less hackable media such as TV to make stupid statements just like every other President. We already have a 24 hour news cycle so we don’t need his unfiltered thoughts every 15 minutes.
By wigby on 07.17.20 4:30pm
I’m not sure I believe this, given how high profile the other accounts were.
Imagine if Trump’s account had tweeted "I’m nuking China right now". Because of how causally he uses that platform, that would not have been entirely believable. The combination of some flawed admin tools and an unstable politician could easily throw the world into chaos.
By Dom-R on 07.17.20 3:56am
Just because Trump could be "the boy who cried wolf" doesn’t meant they don’t need to guard against bad actors. Regardless what you say or think, his words have the power to start wars and move financial markets and that needs to have more protection.
By shabanga on 07.17.20 7:51am
The best safeguards in the world are useless as long as there are clueless people. We send out fake emails every now and then (more then than now) from HR or IT asking for credentials. More than half supply them because they don’t take basic precautions. Granted we don’t make the emails sloppy and they look really legit, but still. Also, sometimes we get forwarded emails from users saying if the email they got from the owner is real. I’m glad they did forward it to us because that tells me they are suspicious, but the owner of the company doesn’t know who they are and isn’t going to need them to go to Walmart to get Google Play gift cards for clients coming to a meeting. But at least they are cautious in this case.
By zedx79 on 07.17.20 10:12am
Maybe all accounts should have the same extra protection..
By Uosdwis on 07.17.20 10:26am
Trump’s account has the potential to incite widespread violence in a single tweet, so I’m glad it has extra protections around it.
By lunarworks on 07.17.20 10:55am
If there had been a breach on Trump’s Twitter account, HIS followers would surely have tried to transfer $1000 bitcoins.
However, after a day of trying to figure out bitcoin, they would have given up and he hackers would not be ahead a single bitcoin.
By DGDMN on 07.17.20 12:11pm
It makes sense that it would. A hacking of his account could be uniquely disastrous considering it could have massive geo-political implications. Imagine if a hacker announced via Trump’s account that nukes were currently on their way to China, just as an extreme example. Yikes.
By RyHerbs on 07.17.20 12:21pm