The web site Gizmodo has just published an article entitled Any Half-Decent Hacker Could Break Into Mar-a-Lago. We Tested It.
We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, and pointed a two-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.
They then proceeded to repeat the experiment at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ, Trump International Hotel in Washington DC and a Trump run golf club in Sterling, Va.
Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.
This is serious Amateur Hour stuff. My home network is more secure than this and I don’t deal in state secrets.
Security experts they contacted were appalled:
“Those networks all have to be crawling with foreign intruders, not just [Gizmodo and] ProPublica,” said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity, Inc., a digital security company, when we told him what we found.
And finally a “Told you so” from one of my favorite Twitter accounts