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MAN REALLY DID HACK TRUMP’S TWITTER ACCOUNT BY GUESSING PASSWORD, ‘MAGA2020!,’
DUTCH PROSECUTORS SAY

By Miriam Berger
December 17, 2020 at 12:02 p.m. EST

President Trump’s Twitter account. (J. David Ake/AP)
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Dutch hacker Victor Gevers claims to have logged in to President Trump’s Twitter
account six years ago by guessing the password: “yourefired.”

Then he did it again. On Oct. 16, Gevers, 44, made an accurate guess,
“maga2020!,” on his fifth try, according to Dutch prosecutors.


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Hacking is a crime in the Netherlands. But on Wednesday, Dutch officials said
they would not press charges because Gevers had met the bar for “responsible
disclosure,” demonstrating how easy it could be to gain access to the U.S.
president’s handle: @realdonaldtrump.



“We believe the hacker has actually penetrated Trump’s Twitter account, but has
met the criteria that have been developed in case law to go free as an ethical
hacker,” the public prosecutor’s office said in a statement, the Guardian
reported.

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Gevers was open about what he had done and said his aim was to show
“vulnerabilities in the Internet,” the BBC reported. On Oct. 22, Gevers shared
screenshots, apparently from inside Trump’s account. He also tweeted some
advice, seemingly directed at the U.S. president, encouraging the use of
two-factor authentication, which makes it harder to hack a password.



Both the White House and Twitter have denied Gevers gained access to the
account.

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“This is absolutely not true but we don’t comment on security procedures around
the President’s social media accounts,” deputy White House press secretary Judd
Deere said in a statement in October.

Twitter said in a statement that it “had seen no evidence to corroborate this
claim, including from the article published in the Netherlands today. We
proactively implemented account security measures for a designated group of
high-profile, election-related Twitter accounts in the United States, including
federal branches of government.”

Twitter and Facebook said Nov. 21 that they will transfer control of the
official POTUS social media accounts to the Joe Biden administration on Jan. 20.
(Video: Reuters)

Gevers, a cybersecurity researcher, told Dutch prosecutors that he was checking
for vulnerabilities in the accounts of U.S. candidates ahead of the November
elections when he breached Trump’s account.

“He later stated to police that he had investigated the strength of the password
because there were major interests involved if this Twitter account could be
taken over so shortly before the presidential election,” the prosecutors said,
according to the BBC.

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