A report from a Dutch newspaper has the story of a Hacker who claims to have pwned Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Apparently, the password was “maga2020!”:
The researcher, Victor Gevers, had access to Trump’s personal messages, could post tweets in his name and change his profile. Gevers took screenshots when he had access to Trump’s account. These screenshots were shared with de Volkskrant by the monthly opinion magazine Vrij Nederland. Dutch security experts find Gevers’ claim credible. The Dutchman alerted Trump and American government services to the security leak. After a few days, he was contacted by the American Secret Service in the Netherlands. This agency is also responsible for the security of the American President and took the report seriously, as evidenced by correspondence seen by de Volkskrant. Meanwhile Trump’s account has been made more secure. This is not the first time that Dutch hackers succeeded in taking over Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The first time was four years ago, just before the 2016 elections, when three hackers jointly managed to retrieve Trump’s password and access his account. That someone has now succeeded again, is remarkable. During the previous presidential elections Russian hackers attempted to influence the elections on a large scale. Subsequently, social media have taken various steps to prevent manipulation.
The dude who’s campaign slogan is MAGA, and is running for election in 2020… has a password of maga2020!
Like seriously? Worst password EVER.
Why isn’t someone in the Trump administration policing Trump’s internet usage? He clearly has the online sense of a nursing home resident. And he’s the most powerful man on Earth. At least for another fortnight one hopes.
Twitter for their part has said that they have no evidence to confirm the claim:
And one would assume that Twitter would at a minimum have access to IP addresses of anyone who logged on. Having said that, they might not want to say that it did happen for their own reasons. Without more evidence, I’m reserving judgment if this is true, even if it would be really hilarious if true.
Now I’ve Caught Shimano’s E-Tube App Snooping My iPhone’s Clipboard….. Just Like The Tacx Utility Does [UPDATE: Fixed]
Posted in Commentary on October 22, 2020 by itnerdYou might remember that I recently caught the Tacx Utility snooping the clipboard on my iPhone. Now I have yet to hear from them on that front. But I have seem to have caught a second company doing the exact same thing. And ironically it’s another bike related brand. Japanese based Shimano is the world’s largest bike component manufacturer. They make bike components for all sorts of cyclists including the biggest pro teams in the world. I use their components on my road bike and that includes a power meter which helps me to train effectively. Now the power meter requires firmware updates from time to time which requires me to use the E-Tube app from Shimano to do that. And like the Tacx Utility, it seems to snoop my clipboard. Video below:
So, just like with Tacx, I Tweeted Shimano asking them…. Well… WTF?
And while I was at it, I asked Tacx for an update as I haven’t heard anything from them:
I’m starting to see a trend here where due to sloppy coding or something more underhanded, apps snoop on the clipboard. That’s really unfortunate and whatever the cause, anyone who does this needs to be immediately called out for doing this. Given that iOS 14 makes it real easy to spot this behavior, app developers who do this should expect to have people like me knocking on their doors asking WTF?
Updates to come.
UPDATE: Tacx responded to me:
Shimano has yet to respond to my inquiry. Which says a lot about Shimano I think.
UPDATE #2: On October 26th, Shimano released an updated version of their E-Tube App.
I did some testing and I am unable to replicate this issue any longer. So it appears to be fixed. Though it would have been nice for them to actually acknowledge that they were snooping on your clipboard in the first place. But I guess that’s too much to ask for.
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