White House and Twitter deny Dutch researcher’s claim he accessed Trump’s account

Both Twitter and the White House are denying a Dutch researcher’s claim that he was able to access President Trump’s account by guessing his password.

Dutch media outlets initially reported Victor Gevers, a security researcher, had correctly guessed the president’s password was “maga2020!”

While Gevers posted a screenshot purporting to show himself having accessed the account, Motherboard notes that the screenshot shows the president’s Twitter bio without the American flag emoji it displays.

Twitter, meanwhile, has said it has seen no evidence of improper access to the account, which has more than 87 million followers.

“We’ve seen no evidence to corroborate this claim, including from the article published in the Netherlands today,” the company said in a statement to The Hill. “We proactively implemented account security measures for a designated group of high-profile, election-related Twitter accounts in the United States, including federal branches of government.”

These measures, according to a September blog post, include requiring such accounts to use a “strong password,” mandating that any using a weak one change it. The password Gevers claims to have guessed has only nine characters, while Twitter’s criteria for strong passwords includes 10 or more characters.

White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere also denied the claim, saying, “This is absolutely not true but we don’t comment on security procedures around the President’s social media accounts.”

White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere denies this happened: “This is absolutely not true but we don’t comment on security procedures around the President’s social media accounts.” cc @0xDUDE https://t.co/xz0ov4jSjY

— Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) October 22, 2020

“I would expect at minimum for every account they would log the IP and device info for every new login,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard. “This would be a ‘new device’ so it would be trivial for Twitter to verify if true or not.”