NYT: Trump is still relying on his unsecured Android phone
Donald Trump is officially in the White House, but he hasn’t actually given up his trusted Android phone, despite major security concerns and reports to the contrary last week. The New York Times claims that Trump is still using his old device — which was outed as a Samsung Galaxy phone last year — over the warnings of some of his aides.
A quick glimpse at his official Twitter account also makes it clear that his most explosive tweets are still coming from “Twitter for Android,” which has been generally been a sign that he’s writing them himself. Meanwhile over at the official @POTUS account, we’re seeing less hyperbolic tweets from Twitter for iPhone, which is a big hint that they’re coming from an aide. It was hard to imagine that Trump would give up on his Twitter addiction entirely, but it’s still surprising to see that he’s still relying on his same combative tone, even though he’s officially President.
If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible “carnage” going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
Given how much attention Trump paid to Hillary Clinton’s private email server, you’d think he’d be careful about opening himself up to similar scrutiny. Of course, tweeting from a personal account is different from storing potentially confidential emails, but Trump’s Android phone is still a dangerous vulnerability. We don’t know if he’s actually dealing with government information on the device, for one, and it’s a pretty obvious data goldmine for hackers and thieves. And even if Trump enabled biometric authentication and device encryption, his old Android phone still wouldn’t be up to the security levels required for his position.
Update: As AndroidCentral points out, it also looks like Trump isn’t just using an unsecured Android phone, he’s using a 2013-era Galaxy S3. That’s particularly disturbing since the S3 hasn’t received a security update since the middle of 2015, and it’s most likely running a practically ancient OS, Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. If true, it means the President of the United States relies on an incredibly vulnerable device day-to-day just for tweets.
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