With roughly a week to go until the U.S presidential election, crypto scammers targeted and briefly succeeded in gaining access to one of Donald Trump’s reelection websites.
The hack was first noticed by Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler on Twitter, and it appears the incident occurred around 4 pm Pacific time on Tuesday, October 27.
The attack lasted about a half-hour and featured messages claiming the hackers had compromising information on Trump and his family along with a solicitation for cryptocurrency.
According to a report by Techcrunch,
“the culprits likely gained access to the donaldjtrump.com web server backend and inserted a long stretch of obfuscated JavaScript, producing a parody of the FBI ‘this site has been seized’ message, which appeared over the normal content.”
The attacker’s gambit was to encourage site visitors to vote on whether or not they should release the compromising information by sending funds to one of two Monero wallets.
One wallet was in favor of releasing the information, the other in support of keeping it classified — the idea being that at a specified time, the balances would be compared, and the corresponding action would be taken for whichever was higher.
The discrediting information reportedly included Trump’s involvement in “the origin of coronavirus” and evidence of his “criminal cooperation with foreign actors to manipulate the 2020 election.” It should be noted that no information was released after the incident.
As for the Trump campaign, communications director Tim Murtaugh did comment on the attack, tweeting that his team was
“working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack.”
And that,
“there was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is stored on the site. The website has been restored.”
