The IT Nerd

Gizmodo is running a story where they test the security at a few properties owned by US President Donald Trump including The Mar-a-Lago Club where he has brought foreign leaders and found that any “half decent hacker” can break into their networks via poorly secured WiFi:

We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, and pointed a two-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.

A few days later, we drove through the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., with the same antenna and aimed it at the clubhouse. We identified two open Wi-Fi networks that anyone could join without a password. We resisted the temptation.

We also visited two of President Donald Trump’s other family-run retreats, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a golf club in Sterling, Va. Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.

That doesn’t sound good. But you’re likely asking “is this really a big deal?” Well, yes it is. Here’s why:

The risks posed by the lax security, experts say, go well beyond simple digital snooping. Sophisticated attackers could take advantage of vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi networks to take over devices like computers or smart phones and use them to record conversations involving anyone on the premises.

“Those networks all have to be crawling with foreign intruders, not just [Gizmodo and] ProPublica,” said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity, Inc., a digital security company, when we told him what we found.

Seeing as Trump is President, likes to go to these places frequently, take foreign leaders to these places, and likely conduct business that affects the security of the United States, this is a problem. Now, if you also consider that he signed an executive order to force the government to step up its game on the cybersecurity front, maybe he should get his own house in order first as the optics from this are pretty craptastic.

This entry was posted on May 18, 2017 at 10:18 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Hacked, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.