In the era of the internet, hacking is an increasingly important espionage tool for foreign actors and nations. Look no further than the 2016 election to see precisely how damaging hacked material can be—not only to the United States government, but to world stability. Our lives and institutions were turned upside down. Russia has reportedly hacked into voter databases and attempted to hack at least two Democratic senators. In the grand scheme of things, that is an example of light hacking compared to what could be done. Russia has targeted the U.S. electrical grid, according to the New York Times. If they successfully shut down our power grid, it would have a devastating and immediate effect on our entire existence. It would grind this country to a halt.
These serious hacking operations by Russia and other foreign nations provide some startling context. Because with these serious threats to our national security at hand, Donald Trump did something quite inexplicable in the early days of his presidency: he named Rudy Giuliani as his top cybersecurity adviser. It was a curious pick at the time because Giuliani seemed to be uniquely unqualified for such a serious role.
And now Giuliani is being mocked worldwide after making a typo on Twitter, a mistake an internet prankster quickly seized upon and turned into an international joke. In short, Giuliani accidentally created a link inside of a tweet. The unknown prankster immediately bought the domain and if you click the link in the tweet, it now goes to a website that has one simple sentence: “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our country.”
Not realizing how Twitter works and how links are created, Giuliani not only left the tweet up, he doubled down and tweeted that it was all a giant Twitter conspiracy.
Needless to say, the mocking has been relentless. You can see a sampling of the mocking below, but it really is no laughing matter that this obviously extremely unqualified person is Trump’s top cybersecurity adviser. It puts all of us at risk.
Edit note: Vox says Giuliani is a now former cybersecurity adviser to Trump.