14 DAY TRIAL // Donald Trump may love to tweet all day, but his account security is not up to par, so one hacker has taken it upon himself to throw around some warnings.
WauchulaGhost, as he identifies himself online, is known for breaching some 500 ISIS accounts on Twitter. Now, he is taking aim at the new President of the United States as a sign of warning. While he says he does not intend to hack these accounts, others may take this opportunity to do just that, CNN reports.
It is not just Trump’s @POTUS account that’s at risk, but also Melania Trump’s @FLOTUS and Mike Pence’s @VP, and that is simply because they have not selected a rather simple security feature that Twitter makes available for everyone: providing a phone number or email address to reset the password.
Warnings aplenty
Over the past few days, the hacker has made some efforts to get the attention of Trump and his cabinet. He has told them to change their emails and fix the Twitter settings, going as far as to share the email accounts used by the First Lady, the Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Dan Scavino, which is the White House Director of Social Media under President Trump.
Change your emails & Fix Settings. @FLOTUS [email protected]@PressSec [email protected]@DanScavino [email protected] pic.twitter.com/YLD4edBoOn — WauchulaGhost (@WauchulaGhost) January 24, 2017
He goes on to say that it has been extremely easy to figure out what emails they used by filling in the missing letters, which is pretty much the first step taken by hackers when trying to breach an account.
WauchulaGhost also told CNN that he figured out Mike Pence’s email address, but it has since been changed. It was pretty obvious too - vicepresident2017 on Gmail.
Hackers can start by guessing an email account, then breaching said email account, resetting the Twitter password and taking over the account. This is quite common practice and has been done countless times by hackers, so it should not be too difficult for someone to breach into these particular accounts either.
Secure your account
If you want to add another layer of security to your own account, all you have to do is go to Settings, tap on the Security and Privacy tab, and scroll down a bit. You will find the “Password reset” feature where you can simply add a checkmark in the box that will push Twitter to require personal information in order to reset your password. For instance, if you have a phone number linked to your account, you may be asked to verify that phone number before you can request the password reset with just your email address.