Trump campaign website hackers threatened to reveal origin of coronavirus

A section of Donald Trump’s campaign website was briefly hijacked by cryptocurrency scammers yesterday. The hackers inserted messages that threatened to reveal “secret conversations and strictly classified information” that proved the “trump-gov is involved in the origin of the corona virus.”

The perpetrators added a version of the FBI’s “this site has been seized” message over the top of the Trump campaign site’s About section, in which they claimed to have gained “full access to trump and relatives” by compromising multiple devices.

“the world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump,” the message read. “it is time to allow the world to know truth.”

The hackers included two Monero addresses in the message, asking people to send the cryptocurrency to one address if they wanted the so-called “strictly classified information” released, or to use the other if they wanted to keep the “truth” hidden. The totals would be compared at the end of the deadline, at which point the scammers would “execute the will of the world.”

As noted by TechCrunch, the page was signed with a PGP public key corresponding to an email address at planet.gov, a non-existent domain.

The message only appeared for a few minutes. Trump campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, said no sensitive data had been exposed as none of it is stored on the site, and the campaign is now working with law enforcement to determine the source of the hack.

Last week, a Dutch security researcher claimed to have accessed Donald Trump’s Twitter account by guessing his password—”maga2020!” The White House has denied the claim, while Twitter says it has “no evidence” of a hack taking place.

Source: techspot.com; coindesk.com