14 DAY TRIAL // Hackers may have just wiped John Podesta's iPhone and iPad after gaining access to his iCloud account, along with his Gmail inbox and Twitter account.
Podesta, who serves as Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, had his private emails dumped online by WikiLeaks on October 13.
As evidence points out, the WikiLeaks staff failed once again to remove personal details from the leaked documents, which has happened quite often in the past months, even drawing criticism from Edward Snowden for failing to sanitize leaks.
Hackers took control of Podesta's Twitter account
According to the hackers, who posted their shenanigans on 4chan, one of the emails listed Podesta's Gmail password, which was "Runner456."
The hackers claim to have successfully gained access to Podesta's email, and then requested a password reset for his Twitter account, later sending out a now-deleted tweet that read "I've switched teams. Vote Trump 2016. Hi pol."
The "pol" mention is a shoutout to the Pol 4chan group, where the now-deleted discussions took place.
Hackers wiped Podesta's iPhone and iPad
A password reset is also the main (unconfirmed) entry point to Podesta's iCloud account, where hackers had triggered a wipe of Podesta's iPhone and iPad using the Find My iPhone feature.
The hackers published a series of screenshots to prove their actions. The Clinton campaign only confirmed the Twitter account takeover, but not the iPhone and iPad data deletion stunt.
The WikiLeaks Podesta email dump was covered from the get-go by all major US publications. The first hacks took place around twelve hours after the WikiLeaks dump. Podesta's staff would have had enough time to change his account's password and turn on two-factor authentication.
It is mind-boggling that Clinton's staffers don't already use two-factor authentication by now, especially after a long series of hacking-related incidents that have affected the Democratic Party all summer. Hackers, and especially those pesky "Russian hackers," have been a central point of the presidential campaign debates.
On Twitter, WikiLeaks claims that its staff had discovered Podesta's email password and had took the necessary steps to changed it to a dummy text. Their explanation doesn't seem to hold water since the hackers said the password found in the WikiLeaks dump worked just fine.
