Yahoo News A hacker redirected dead links in Trump tweets to 'Brony' videos
If you can stomach scrolling back through President Donald Trump's Twitter feed, you're in for a treat. Make it far enough and you'll stumble across this gem:
"@FranzThompson: @LOUISFANUCCHIIV Go vote and support @realDonaldTrump at http://t.co/9LnAKc0KGF" That sounds cool!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2013
From the attached video, the tweet makes it look like the 45th president of the United States is a fan of My Little Pony conventions — but as far as we know, he's not a "brony" in reality.
The video made its way to Trump's Twitter via a Belgian hacker, Inti De Ceukelaire. He's taken control of several domains Trump has tweeted out over the years by buying the expired URLs and redirecting them to humorous videos mocking Trump, The Verge reports.
SEE ALSO: How Twitter took on Trump's bot army—and won
De Ceukelaire extracted every link Trump has ever shared on the platform from an archive of his tweets. To check which were available for hijacking, he wrote a “quick and dirty” program to identify dead links and checked them out manually.
Once he had his target sites (the hacker has purchased six of these domains so far), De Ceukelaire used Twitter’s card validator to re-scan the tweet's URL, replacing it with new live links. Another of his videos is a full-on music video mocking Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin's cozy bromance.
I'll be speaking tomorrow at the San Jose Convention Center (CA) for the first- ever National Achievers Congress http://t.co/m4JN2oIw
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2012
Since Trump hasn't shown much discretion with the links he promotes on Twitter, many more dead domains might be up for grabs soon, opening opportunities for others to use the method to potentially alter the meanings of old tweets.
De Ceukelaire says he's personally done with the pranks.
“I just wanted to prove that it's possible and dangerous,” he said to The Verge.
Add these dead domains to the growing list of concerns about Trump's Twitter habits — from its tendency to move markets to its possible lack of basic security features, there are legitimate reasons some want to see him banned from the platform. We're laughing about these videos now, but unless the account is locked down somehow, the future might not be so funny.
