Like his boss, Rudy Giuliani loves Twitter, but he has a problem. Rudy is a poor typist, and often mistypes URLs in his tweets (along with inserting other spelling errors). A director for a cybersecurity company noted that Giuliani creates these bad URLs regularly. His mistyped URLs have become so common that hackers have started buying up the erroneous URLs and redirecting people unfortunate (or stupid) enough to click on those links to fake pages designed to spread malware.
For example, Giuliani meant to tweet a link to his own website RudyGiulianics.com, but by mistake inserted a space after Rudy. This created a link to Giulianics.com, which didn’t exist until a hacker set up a website for it. That website redirects about six times through websites that collect tracking data on visitors, and then lands on an unsecured website that prompts visitors to download a Google Chrome extension that steals their browsing history and changes their default search engine.
In another example, Giuliani tweeted a link to his website (again), but left out one letter to make it RudyGiuliancs.com. In this case, the hacker who created that domain merely used it to redirect the visitor to the Wikipedia page about Trump’s impeachment.
In yet another example, he left out a space between “G-20” and “.ln”, and Twitter mistook it for a URL and created a link out of it. Just fifteen minutes later a Twitter user had registered the domain and pointed it at an anti-Trump website.
These fat fingered typos can have serious consequences. New York Daily News editorial board member Laura Nahmias admitted that she had clicked on a link in a tweet that was supposedly to Giuliani’s website, but instead was sent to a website that installed malware. Once her computer was infected, she started receiving constant pop-ups for fake antivirus software.
As a high-level journalist, Nahmias takes extra precautions to avoid malware. She brought in the Daily News IT department, who tried several times to remove the bad software, but to no avail. Without any way to stop the malware, she ended up buying a new computer.
Apparently Giuliani doesn’t care about his dangerous mistakes, because he keeps making them. What makes this truly ironic is that at one point, Giuliani was named the Trump administration’s cybersecurity advisor. But of course, Donald Trump hires only the best people.
