Donald Trump’s former Twitter password didn’t exactly take a mastermind to crack, according to a hacker interviewed in the new Netflix documentary, The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem, which began streaming today.
“I did indeed discover Donald Trump’s Twitter password, which was Maga2020 with an exclamation mark,” Aubrey Cottle said in the documentary. “He changed a single digit to Maga2024! That was the password for @realDonaldTrump. I had that shit!”
Cottle, who is identified by his online alias “kirtaner” in the documentary, is a Canadian “hacktivist,” who claims to be an early founding member of the online movement known as Anonymous. According to Cottle, he was a 4chan admin in the early days of the meme forum website, but was kicked off the server after he had a disagreement with 4chan founder Christopher Poole, aka “moot.” (Cottle says Poole wanted 4chan to become a social network more akin to Facebook, while Cottle felt the site should retain it anonymous, chaotic spirit.) Cottle got together with his like-minded 4chan friends, and founded Anonymous. The group would troll and “raid” other websites, as well as real-world targets, including the white supremacist commentator Hal Turner and the Church of Scientology. The group was known for using Guy Fawkes masks, and backed the Occupy Wall Street protests. But a lot of members weren’t hacking for a cause—they just thought it was funny.
The joke got a lot less funny after Anonymous—in retaliation for what they saw as state-sanctioned violence toward the Occupy Wall Street movement—hacked into the CIA and FBI, and put a target on their backs. The FBI arrested Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond in 2012 and sentenced him to 10 years. The other longtime Anonymous hackers like Cottle were effectively scared into hanging up their keyboards for many years. But, Cottle says in the Netflix documentary, he was inspired to come back online when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
This time, Cottle was on the FBI’s side. He helped recover deleted data from the social network Parler, which then allowed the FBI to identify the many individuals who posted photos and videos of themselves inside the Capitol. “All of it was right there, right for the taking, and we pulled it all down and released it to the public,” Cottle says in the doc. “It was poetry in motion. This is the environment that I thrive in. I’m just like, ‘Who’s next?'”
Cottle claims to have gone on to hack Epik hosting—a website hosting company that’s known for hosting alt-right and neo-Nazi websites—and, apparently, the former President of the United States’s Twitter account. In a clip from one of Kirtaner’s live streams that’s featured in the film, one of the hacker’s buddies claims that “minor variations on that password work in a lot of places.”
But it hasn’t been a happy ending for Cottle—the movie ends with him being investigate by the FBI for “some alleged online activities.”
“I am in a very similar situation as Jeremy Hammond was,” Cottle says. “That’s absolutely fucking terrifying, because Hammond went to prison for a decade.”