The hackers also accused Trump — without evidence — of helping create COVID.
Fake News
On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump's re-election campaign website was temporarily hijacked by a team of still-unidentified hackers.
The site was restored after just half an hour, according to The New York Times. But during that time, the hackers accused Trump — without evidence — of somehow helping create the coronavirus, as well as helping "foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections." Oh, and perhaps the main motivation: The hackers wanted some cryptocurrency for their trouble.
I'm In
The hackers set up a sort of tip jar for the cryptocurrency Monero, the NYT reports, and created a poll asking whether they should dump sensitive information, including secret internal conversations, that they claimed to have accessed. Donate in one bin, and you were apparently voting for "Yes, share the data." Click the other button, they said, and you were donating for "No, do not share the data."
However, Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh says it's impossible for the hackers to have acquired any confidential data, saying that none was actually stored on the website in the first place.
Bit Ironic
Ironically, Trump boasted that it would be ridiculous to expect political hackers to succeed in these last days before the 2020 election.
"Nobody gets hacked," he said at an Arizona rally earlier this month. "To get hacked you need somebody with 197 I.Q. and he needs about 15 percent of your password."
READ MORE: Trump Campaign Website Is Defaced by Hackers [The New York Times]
More on political hackers: Google: Foreign Hackers Targeting Both Trump And Biden Campaigns
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