Giuliani Among Hacked Trump Appointees

Passwords used by Donald Trump’s incoming cyber security advisor Rudy Giuliani and 13 other top staff members have been leaked in mass hacks, a Channel 4 News reveals. Kyle Wilhoit, Senior Security Researcher at DomainTools commented below.

Kyle Wilhoit, Senior Security Researcher at DomainTools:

“Unfortunately leaks that include identifiable information like emails and passwords are common and in many cases, can’t be avoided. In this case, the leaked email address appeared to come from a common social networking site. The issue isn’t necessarily about the passwords being leaked. The primary problem is password re-use between a social networking site, and say, some other system that could be deemed operationally important . All it takes is an attacker to find out their password from a dump, and capitalize on that human error of re-use. Keep in mind, most people don’t even realize they’ve performed password re-use…They are flooded everyday with requests to generate passwords, and it’s human nature to re-use those same passwords over and over again…It’s just easier.”