Donald Trump’s campaign says its website was “defaced” on Tuesday evening, and that it is working with law enforcement to investigate the source of what it called an “attack”.
A Trump campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, said: “there was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is actually stored on the site”.
The Trump website seems to have been restored and was fully functional as of Tuesday evening. Screenshots circulating online appeared to show that the site had briefly displayed a bogus message spoofing a law enforcement announcement.
Screenshots showed the site briefly displayed a warning claiming that it had been “seized” because “the world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump. it is time to allow the world to know truth.”
.@realDonaldTrump's campaign website has been hacked. Doing research for a climate change article and this is what pops up: pic.twitter.com/Kjc2ELSdAV
— Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler (@ggreschler) October 27, 2020
The site’s “About” section was replaced with what appeared to be a scam to collect cryptocurrency, TechCrunch reports.
It later displayed an error message that read, in part, “This site is currently offline.”
Past boasts by hackers to have inside access to Trump-related correspondence – notably by a group that claimed to have penetrated an entertainment law firm earlier this year – have come to nothing.
Last week, Dutch media reported that a security expert and researcher had gained access to Trump’s Twitter account simply by guessing his password – “maga2020!”. Twitter, however, denied the report.
