Donald Trump’s old Twitter password didn’t require a brain to crack, according to a hacker interviewed in the new Netflix documentary, The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem, which began airing today.
“I discovered Donald Trump’s Twitter password, which was Maga2020 with an exclamation point,” Aubrey Cottle said in the documentary. “Replaced a single number with Maga2024! That was @realDonaldTrump’s password. I had this!
Cottle, known in the documentary through his online pseudonym “kirtaner,” is a Canadian hacktivist who claims to be one of the first founding members of the online movement known as Anonymous. According to Cottle, he was a 4chan admin at get started on the meme forum website, but was banned from the server after having a war of words with 4chan founder Christopher Poole, also known as “non-applicable. “(Cottle says Poole sought out 4chan for a social network closer to Facebook, while Cottle felt the site deserves to keep its anonymous and chaotic spirit. ) Cottle teamed up with his like-minded friends at 4chan and founded Anonymous. The organization would troll and “attack” other websites, as well as real-world targets, adding a white supremacist commentator. Hal Turner and the Church of Scientology. Se knew that the organization wore the Guy Fawkes mask and supported the Occupy Wall Street protests. But many members didn’t hack for a cause: they just thought it was fun.
The joke was much less amusing after Anonymous, in retaliation for what they saw as state-sanctioned violence and opposed to the Occupy Wall Street movement, hacked into the CIA and FBI and attacked them. The FBI arrested anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond in 2012 and convicted other Anonymous hackers, like Cottle, have been afraid to hang up their keyboards for many years. But, Cottle says in the Netflix documentary, he came up with the idea to reconnect when Trump supporters stormed the U. S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
This time, Cottle was on the FBI’s side. He helped remove information from the social network Parler, which then allowed the FBI to identify the many Americans who posted photos and videos of themselves on Capitol Hill. “All of this was there,” it was poetry in motion. It’s the environment in which I thrive. I’m just thinking, “Who’s next?”
Cottle claims to have hacked into Epik Hosting, a hosting company known for hosting far-right and neo-Nazi members, and, apparently, the former U. S. president’s Twitter account. In an excerpt from one of Kirtaner’s livestreams featured in the film, one of the hacker’s friends claims that “minor diversifications of this password work in many places. “
But it wasn’t a satisfying ending for Cottle: The film ends with an FBI investigation into him for “some alleged online activities. “
“I’m in a very similar situation to Jeremy Hammond,” Cottle says. “It’s probably terrifying, because Hammond was in prison for a decade. “