A Belgian hacker apparently redirected links in President Donald Trump’s old tweets to wacky videos, according to The Verge.
The hacker, who goes by the name Inti De Ceukelaire, said he did it after Trump said Brussels was “hellhole” during last year’s primary campaign.
How The Hacker Mocked Trump Using His Tweets
The hacker shows how simple it is to manipulate Trump’s tweets.
In one of the hijacked tweets, posted on April 2012, Trump said, “I’ll be speaking tomorrow at the San Jose Convention Center (CA) for the first- ever National Achievers Congress.” Trump also posted a link to the event’s site, nac2012.com.
If you look at the tweet now, the post has a YouTube video called “Trump’s Russian Congress,” which was obviously not what Trump had originally tweeted. The video, featuring photoshopped images mocking Trump’s ties to Russia and alleged involvement with Russian women, show’s the president dancing to an upbeat song, posing with Playboy bunnies and even has Putin busting moves next to Trump.
Here is the tweet with the video:
The hacker said he bought the nac2012.com domain and redirected it to the YouTube clip, which he made himself. He also bought three other expired links Trump has tweeted over the years. The hacker said he hijacked the post by extracting all of the links from an online archive of Trump’s tweets.
The Verge explained more on how the hacker manipulated the tweets:
“He then wrote a ‘quick and dirty’ program to check whether any of the links directed to a dead site, and manually checked whether any of the domains were available for sale. After purchasing the nac2012.com domain, he redirected it to his YouTube video and used Twitter’s card validator tool to re-scan the URL — effectively updating Trump’s tweet with the video embed.”
Inti De Ceukelaire said he purchased five more domains and redirected one used in a post Trump retweeted in 2013. In the post, the user was urging people to vote for the reality star on famesday.com, which is now redirected to a YouTube video about an event for My Little Pony fans.
Here is the tweet:
The hacker said he doesn’t plan to manipulate other Trump tweets, but he wanted to show how posts can be hijacked.
“I just wanted to prove that it’s possible and dangerous,” he told The Verge, adding that many links Trump has tweeted in the past could expire within the next few years and could be exploited for malicious purposes.
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