Vladimir Putin is going to feel like a chump, spending all that dough on first rate hackers and crackers and Tass-dropped Oval Office bugs when it turns out any Phreak with mid-70s skilz can probably dial into Himself’s daily ditherings.
While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was “too inconvenient,” the same administration official said.
The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts. It is unclear how often Trump’s call-capable phones, which are essentially used as burner phones, are swapped out.
Yeah, that’s right. The guy who slipped into office to echoing cries of “But Her Emails” refuses to practice the most basic security procedures for his talks with world leaders and midnight Gossip Girl sessions with Sean Hannity because it’s just too much trouble.
Which brings up the possibility that not only sophisticated Russian hackers, but any stray scriptkiddie with a hankering to hear the Leader of the Free World call out for another cheeseburger can hop on the party line.
Even more terrifying, if you wish to crunch a few more lines of code, there’s no telling what you’ll see…
Trump’s call-capable cell phone has a camera and microphone, unlike the White House-issued cell phones used by Obama. Keeping those components creates a risk that hackers could use them to access the phone and monitor the president’s movements. The GPS location tracker, however – which can be used to track the president’s whereabouts – is disabled on Trump’s devices.
“Executive time,” anyone?