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Trump’s re-election campaign marred by Cryptocurrency scammers

Photo of: Janeth Diamond
by Janeth Diamond

It is crucial times in the US with elections just around the corner and candidates all actively promoting their candidature to get elected for the most important role. President Trump is also up for a re-run this year to get reelected back to the Whitehouse. Yesterday afternoon, President Trump’s re-election website suffered a little vandalization attempt or faced a partial hack as some unknown nemesis of the election time, took over a few portions of the web page, and replaced it with what appeared as a scam to collect cryptocurrency. 

In the hack attempt, the hackers managed to replace donaldtrump.com’s routine and customary campaign rhetoric and all of a sudden started the request for donations. And that’s not all, the request for donations was accompanied by a burlesque of the FBI’s “The site has been seized” message. 

The attackers also made a claim that they had under control all of the classified information and emboldened the people to vote on whether they wanted the data released with payments to two Monero wallets. The hack was first noted by Gabriel Lorenzo Grescher on Twitter which took place shortly before 4 pm Pacific time. The miscreants could have gained access to the website web server backend and have injected a long rally of muddled and confused JavaScript in which the spoof message was sent. The message appeared overwritten on the normal content. 

Source: Twitter

“The world has had enough of the fake-news spread daily by president Donald j trump,” the new site read. “it is time to allow the world to know the truth.”

The insider information apparently reports that there was evidence in possession that discredited Trump as a President and also blamed his government by calling it “the origin of coronavirus”. But, as of now, there is no certainty if the hackers really have any discrediting information or evidence that would tarnish the Trump administration. Upon further observance, it was found that the website did not have any sensitive information per se. This was confirmed by none other than Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s campaign communications director, who confirmed the attack in a tweet. 

Source: Twitter

Such acts of hack which get people to send cryptocurrencies to a mysterious address has become a common form of scam online. These scams get their moments of fame especially when they are given weightage on high visibility platforms like celebrity Twitter accounts and the like. This one is no different and was highly vulnerable when it was taken down in just a few minutes. 

As of now, there is no proof whatsoever if the attack was by any means state-sponsored. But the tone of the message and the manner it was done appeared as though the hacker is trying to champion a cause but the manner it was done lacked any form of rationality. During election times, website activity heightens and they become high-value targets for hackers as they are associated with popular entities. 

Trump also recently claimed that no one gets hacked just a few days before having his Twitter account hacked by a Dutch researcher. The hacker claimed that he guessed the password as ‘maga2020’ after he made four unsuccessful attempts. The elections this time is interesting because a few candidates contesting are in favor of cryptocurrencies.