The IT Nerd

President Trump’s campaign website was briefly and partially hacked Tuesday afternoon as unknown adversaries took over the “About” page and replaced it with what appeared to be a scam to collect cryptocurrency:

There is no indication, despite the hackers’ claims, that “full access to trump and relatives” was achieved or “most internal and secret conversations strictly classified information” were exposed. The hack seemingly took place shortly after 4 PM Pacific time. The culprits likely gained access to the donaldjtrump.com web server backend and replaced the “About” page with a long stretch of obfuscated javascript producing a parody of the FBI “this site has been seized” message. 

“the world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump,” the new site read. “it is time to allow the world to know truth.” Claiming to have inside information on the “origin of the corona virus” and other information discrediting Trump, the hackers provided two Monero addresses. Monero is a cryptocurrency that’s easy to send but quite difficult to track. For this reason it has become associated with unsavory operations such as this hack. One address was for people that wanted the “strictly classified information” released, the other for those who would prefer to keep it secret. After an unspecified deadline the totals of cryptocurrency would be compared and the higher total would determine what was done with the data.

The website was reverted back to normal in a few minutes. But it is the latest cybersecurity issue that Trump has had in the last few weeks. After all a Dutch security researcher claimed to have pwned his Twitter account not too long ago. Clearly, Trump and his minions have no clue about IT security.

UPDATE: I have a comment about this incident from Mike Beck, Global CISO at Darktrace 

This news does not come as a surprise – in the run up to elections, in this case one of the most significant in history, political parties and individuals will be battling attempts against their systems on a daily basis. Some attacks are more successful than others, some are advanced and others less so. This is an example of an “unsophisticated scam” but this does not preclude involvement from nation-state affiliates, and we shouldn’t ignore that the hackers were still able to gain access to the website and cause mischief.

The more pressing concern for the candidates is how to detect sophisticated attacks or insider threats. 

Digital campaigning is now central for reaching the electorate. As political campaigns are run increasingly within a digital context, attackers might aim to do damage in a number of ways, whether by accessing data on voters or campaign strategy that would deliver a competitive advantage to the adversary, by opportunistically digging for information that could be reputationally damaging to prominent individuals, or by disrupting the organization so as to slow productivity. 

In this new era of deepfakes, disinformation and increasingly sophisticated hackers, governments, political parties, the media and campaign groups must all be on the leading edge of innovation to protect targeted data and minimise the impact of any attempts to disrupt their activities. Cyber security AI will be a fundamental ally to not only detect these attempts early but actively stop them in their tracks, before confidence and data integrity is seriously undermined.

What is it with Donald Trump and Russians? I say that because the latest Russian connection has something in the region of 250 web domains that are owned by the Trump Organization have hidden connections that route through Russia for reasons that nobody understands. Here’s what Engadget had to say on this:

A new report from researchers at Unhack The Vote alleges that Donald Trump’s various web properties could hold a clue as to the President’s communication ties with Russia, and the evidence is quite substantial.

The report, which cites over 250 different subdomains belonging to the Trump organization, reveals that the web properties have hidden connections to servers that route through Russia — more specifically, through St. Petersburg. What’s most interesting is that these subdomains are named and cataloged in such a way as to avoid the chances that any random web user might accidentally stumble upon them.

If that’s not weird enough, it gets weirder:

On top of the strange communication with Russian servers, the researchers discovered what appears to be records of some extremely shady files. Filenames like “l0v3LYg1rLS0nlY4y0U.html1.zip” — which, if you’re not well versed in 1999 internet neckbeard leetspeak, means “lovely girls only 4 you” — or “gR33TpUsSY4Tth1SwE3k.html1.zip” (Great pussy for T this weekend), appear multiple times in the servers’ records. The full report is obviously well worth a read.

This is all very strange.

So the question is this…. Have these domains been pwned by hackers? If so, why hasn’t the Trump Organization’s IT department shut this down? Or is something else going on that Special Counsel Robert Muller might want to have a look at because it might tie into his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election? Either way, someone needs to answer some questions on this because on the surface, this clearly raises some red flags.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning travel to the United States from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia for 90 days. He’s also suspended bringing in refugees from Syria for an indefinite amount of time. Because those countries are Muslim majority countries, he’s effectively banning people based on faith.

In response to this, The Canadian tech community has issued an open letter to the world that condemns the actions taken by President Trump. The letter also calls on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to immediately give temporary residency to those displaced by the U.S. order. That’s something that may happen tonight as the Canadian Parliament is going to hold an emergency debate on the issue. As I type this, over 1000 people from 600 companies have signed this letter. Many of whom are C-Level execs, and includes many notable names in Canada’s tech community. These people have joined their counterparts in the US who have also denounced this move by Trump.

My take on this issue goes something like this. We all benefit from having diverse views and experiences at the table. We hurt ourselves when we exclude people for any reason from any discussion. This ban is nothing short of overt racism towards those of the Muslim faith. Thus this cannot be tolerated.

You can add your name to the letter here.

President Elect Donald Trump had that tech summit that I spoke of yesterday. Here’s who showed up:

• Safra Catz – Oracle
• Jeff Bezos – Amazon
• Tim Cook – Apple
• Brian Krzanich – Intel
• Larry Page – Alphabet
• Eric Schmidt – Google
• Chuck Robbins – Cisco
• Ginni Rommety – IBM
• Sheryl Sandberg – Facebook
• Elon Musk – Tesla
• Satya Nadella – Microsoft
• Alex Karp – Palantir

Trump had his kids Eric, Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka,  and vice president elect Mike Pence in the room as well. And apparently Apple CEO Tim Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk got private briefings with Trump, according to transition staff. Here’s what CNBC said:

Though many tech leaders actively opposed his election, Trump said at the meeting he was interested in helping tech do well — and that the executives can call any time, since there’s no formal chain of command.

“We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation,” Trump said. “There’s no one like you in the world….anything we can do to help this go along, we’re going to be there for you. You can call my people, call me — it makes no difference — we have no formal chain of command around here.”

Good luck with that as I am pretty sure that being the President of the United States means that Trump won’t be having just anybody just randomly dialing him up. Thus  I suspect that his “people” will be taking any incoming calls from these c-level execs. Here’s what they talked about:

Jobs, skilled immigration and China were the main topics on the table at a meeting, a person familiar with what was discussed told CNBC on Wednesday.

And you can bet that jobs coming back to the US was on the table as well. By that I mean jobs that Apple has in China making iPhones and the like seeing as during the campaign, Trump criticized Apple for that.

I sure would have liked to have been a fly on the wall of that meeting as many of the people in the room don’t like this guy. I am sure that they polite and listened to him. But I simply do not see them fully embracing him. Sure some of them are likely to do some things to keep him off their backs. Example, IBM is about to go on a hiring spree. But I can’t see MacBooks and iPhones being made in the USA. EVER. So one wonders what was accomplished other than a photo op.

A small group of tech leaders have apparently been summoned by President-elect Donald Trump’s to a tech summit at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to Recode. Here’s who’s apparently going to show up: 

Those who will be attending (although most of the companies declined to comment to Recode) along with Page, Cook and Sandberg, include: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; and Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

“I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can,” said Catz in a statement. “If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”

It’s not clear who the other attendees are, because many more invites went out late this week. Whether tech’s most high-profile exec, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is going is unknown, although he is an obvious invite.

But Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was invited, said sources, and he is likely to attend.

Bezos’ presence would be awkward, obviously, given how aggressive his Washington Post has been in its reporting on Trump and how many times the reality show star turned President-elect has attacked Amazon on a number of issues.

Here’s who is likely to give this event a pass:

The list of those not invited or invited but not going — the equivalent of the “I’m washing my hair” excuse, I guess — is even more interesting, including those from pretty much all of its most innovative companies. Some just got invites late this week, by the way, which shows how rolling the invites might have been.

Thus, no on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (invited, but out of country), no on Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (invited and a Thiel investment, but out of country), no on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, no on Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, no on Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and no on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.

In other words, most of the cool kids are staying West. “I think my invite got lost in the mail,” joked one. “Of course, this kind of thing will never happen again as of January.”

And prominent venture capitalists and entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman are also not attending. Let that sink in — both Levchin and Hoffman worked with Thiel at PayPal and are close to him. Hoffman has been a big critic of Trump and continues to be.

Sources also said Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, another prominent and vocal Trump detractor, is also not going. During the campaign, the Republican stalwart — one of the few in Silicon Valley — called Trump a “dishonest demagogue” and compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. Let’s be fair, that’s pretty hard to walk back.

Also not attending is Mark Cuban who is no fan of Trump.

Here’s the thing, I have no idea what this could possibly acomplish. A lot of the tech industry doesn’t like this guy. Thus I really don’t see how they could possible suddenly play nice with this guy and his agenda. But it’s the sort of thing that could end up being a circus that might be worth watch for no other reason than cheap entertainment.