Who Hacked Donald Trump's Website?

If you went onto the Trump-Pence campaign website today, you may have briefly seen something startling: A poop emoji. Followed by pro-Hillary slogans. Followed by… ‘80’s song lyrics? Unsurprisingly, it was not put there by the Trump campaign — so who hacked Donald Trump’s website? It turns out that there wasn’t a single culprit, but dozens of people who figured out how to exploit a major vulnerability in the website’s code. And though it’s not nice to alter another person’s website without their consent, I have to say that these alternative “Trump headlines” are super entertaining.

The glitch that allowed people to revise the Trump website made changing the site so simple that it seems like an overstatement to even call it “hacking.” For a short period, people discovered that if they went on the page “https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/archive/,” they could change the header to whatever they wanted by simply adding words after “archive/.” (People could easily add emoji, too.) So, as Slate points out, if you added "congratulations%20to%20president-elect%20clinton" to the end of the URL, you'd get a header on the Trump website that said, “Congratulations President-elect Clinton.” (And of course someone did do that).

The Trump Campaign fixed the glitch, but not before lots of different people had some fun with their own “modifications,” which fit into a variety of categories:

1. Some made Trump's site pro-Clinton.

2. Some made the site anti-Trump.

3. Some used Trump's own words against him.

4. Some went with the ever-eloquent emoji.

5. Some people were more angry about the shoddy coding than this horrible election.

6. Some went with the immortal words of Toto (as you do).

7. Some created a meme within a meme, creating a vortex of memes that will eventually lead to the implosion of reality as we know it (if the election doesn't do it first).

Thank you, Internet, for providing a little levity on what's sure to be an intense evening. We need all of the silliness we can get.