Incidents

Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform, was hacked during its first days of testing

Since the big social media companies decided to ban their online accounts, former U.S. President Donald Trump and his team confirmed that they would start their efforts to create and maintain a social media of their own for their supporters; known as Truth Social, the website would begin testing this week. Despite being one of the richest men on the planet, Trump was about to realize the difficulties of maintaining such a platform.

According to recent reports, a group of pranksters found what appeared to be a trial version of the platform, creating an account identified as “donaldjtrump” and posting a photo of a pig defecating on the compromised profile. After the incident, Truth Social has remained disconnected.


The website had been unveiled on Wednesday, through former President new media company Trump Media & Tech Group; the developers assured that this platform would rival the big tech companies and provide total freedom of expression to their users, although they seem to have forgotten cybersecurity. Apparently, access to the mentioned account was possible due to an open registration page, which allowed creating the profile and publishing the aforementioned images.

After the detection of this activity, Truth Social operators restricted the creation of new accounts and disconnected the site. Statements have been requested from the company, although Trump Media &Tech Group has not responded.


It should be remembered that, in January of this year, Twitter definitively expelled Donald Trump from the platform after the incident of violence at the US Capitol, so Trump has been trying to make noise again from social networks for months.

About Truth Social, cybersecurity experts report that this is an almost exact copy of Twitter; users can post “truths” in the same way a tweet is posted and there’s even a feature identical to retweet, plus news sections and direct messaging. The app runs an almost unmodified version of Mastodon, the open-source software that any developer can use for the creation of social media platforms.

Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon, recently mentioned that Trump’s site violates Mastodon’s licensing rules, which require developers to share any modifications and links to the original source code. Rochko said he has contacted the company’s legal counsel to make a determination although nothing has been finalized.

To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.


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