Social-Media
Trump's Twitter account has additional security, which may be why he didn't get hacked.
Yesterday 's major assault on Twitter, some of the highest-profile accounts on the site, including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates, had their accounts hacked to peddle bitcoin scams. Notably, however, Donald Trump, possibly the most popular Twitter user of all, was unaffected by the attack, and that may be because Twitter has given extra security for his account.
In a deeply-reported article on the attack, The New York Times reports that Trump's Twitter account has extra security from "past events," citing two unnamed sources — a senior White House official and a Twitter employee.
Update: We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We won’t be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it. https://t.co/8EfEzHvB7p
— TwitterGov (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
The New York Times did not indicate what those past events were, but they may relate to the November 2nd, 2017 incident in which a rogue employee had deactivated Trump's account on his last day at the company. Trump's account went back to Twitter 11 minutes later.
The day after the deactivation, Twitter said it had "implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again." At the time, however, The Wall Street Journal claimed that Twitter had already restricted the number of workers who could access Trump's account after his inauguration. Usually, these tools allow workers to suspend or deactivate accounts, but don't let them tweet from those accounts.
Motherboard reported that the people involved in the attack on Wednesday were sharing screenshots of a Twitter admin tool apparently used for the attack. And Twitter itself has said that its own employee systems and tools have been compromised. If these are also the same systems that no longer had widespread access to Trump's account as of 2017, it could have made it more difficult, if not impossible, to access his account from the admin tool used by the attackers. It is also possible that Trump's account was further hardened after it was deactivated by a rogue employee in November 2017.
Twitter has not responded to a request for comments, so we can't be sure that those safeguards are what kept the attackers from hijacking their account on Tuesday. It's not obvious, in truth, that the attackers have even tried. They didn't get in either way, and that could have prevented a very bad situation from getting worse.
