Trump "Covid" Hackers Demanded Monero (XMR) Payment

---

With just a few days left before election day in the US is set to either stop or extend US President Donald Trump’s run in the White House, it was not the best of times for his personal website to get hacked by crypto scammers demanding payment in Monero, but that is in fact exactly what happened earlier this week.

The FBI was immediately called to investigate after the Trump campaign’s website was “seized”.

A group of unknown hackers claimed that the Republican administration had secret knowledge about the origins of the coronavirus and claimed that the Trump White House was actively cooperating with “foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections.”

Donald Trump’s website hacked, hacker asking for XMR to release supposedly classified documents #hack #monero pic.twitter.com/PP9y20xfHN

— CipherBlade (@cipher_blade) October 28, 2020

In order to release the data substantiating their claim, they demanded payment in Monero. It is at this time not known whether any major sums have been transferred to their address.

Law enforcement

Tim Murtaugh, appointed as spokesman for the Republican President’s campaign, admitted the hack and stated that the organisation was: “working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack.”

There was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is actually stored on the site. The website has been restored.

💻 #Crypto scammers who successfully hacked into US President @realDonaldTrump’s election campaign looking for payment in @monero (#XMR) appear to have sparked a new interest in the most popular privacy coin

Take a look:https://t.co/7nnQrtPx8o

— cryptonews.com (@cryptonews) October 28, 2020

The attack was reported in the US press but got buried as soon as the stock market selloff started to intensify over Covid-19 lockdown fears in Europe

Twitter Bitcoin Scam

As it only lasted for some 30 minutes, the so-called “Trump crypto scam” could not compete with the major crypto scam of this year, the “celebrity’ attack which happened in July of this year. At that moment, hackers infiltrated some 100 accounts of various celebrities and asked for payments in Bitcoin. The FBI later arrested a 17-year old in Florida.