GETTR, the Twitter-like social network set up by allies of former President Donald Trump, suffered a brief hack on its official launch day Sunday. Several verified accounts on the site run by Jason Miller, a Trump adviser and former spokesman, were hacked and they were changed to show the message: “@JubaBaghdad was here :) ^^ free palestine ^^.” Other hacked accounts had the message: “@JubaBaghdad was here, follow me in twitter :)”. The accounts that were hacked included those belonging to Mike Pompeo, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Harlan Hill, and Sean Parnell. The pro-Trump network Newsmax was also hacked as was GETTR’s official support page.
Miller minimized the issue. “The problem was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names,” Miller said in an emailed statement. When asked specifically about security on the new site, Miller said the situation had been “rectified.”
Insider exchanged direct messages via Twitter with the user who claimed responsibility for the hack. The user said he carried out the hack “just for fun” and insisted it was an “easy” feat. “They should not publish the website before making sure everything, or at least almost everything, is secure,” he added. Several others had already pointed out potential security and privacy concerns with the platform.
Although the social media platform was quietly launched in June, it got a flood of attention Thursday after Politico wrote a piece on its ties to Miller. Since then, the site has been flooded with pornographic images. An introductory message on the site was filled with “things like anime porn and repeated copies of an image depicting Hillary Clinton’s head photoshopped onto another woman’s nude body,” Mother Jones wrote Thursday. The app is live in Google and Apple’s app stores and describes itself as “a brand new social media platform founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought, and rejecting political censorship and ‘cancel culture.’” Slate’s Aaron Mak described it as “a lot like Twitter, except with worse functionality and more racism.”
