Trump's cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient 'easily hackable website'
Stunned security experts tear strips off president-elect pick hours after announcement
US president-elect Donald Trump's freshly minted cyber-tsar Rudy Giuliani runs a website with a content management system years out of date and potentially utterly hackable.
Former New York City mayor and Donald loyalist Giuliani was today unveiled by Trump's transition team as the future president's cybersecurity adviser – meaning Giuliani will play a crucial role in the defense of America's computer infrastructure.
Giulianisecurity.com, the website for the ex-mayor's eponymous infosec consultancy firm, is powered by a roughly five-year-old build of Joomla! that is packed with vulnerabilities. Some of those bugs can be potentially exploited by miscreants using basic SQL injection techniques to compromise the server.
This seemingly insecure system also has a surprising number of network ports open – from MySQL and anonymous LDAP to a very out-of-date OpenSSH 4.7 that was released in 2007.
Security gurus are right now tearing strips off Trump's cyber-wizard pick. Top hacker Dan Tentler was first to point out the severely out-of-date Joomla! install.
"It speaks volumes," Tentler told The Register, referring to Giuliani's computer security credentials, or lack of, and fitness for the top post.
"Seventy-year-old luddite autocrats who often brag about not using technology are somehow put in charge of technology: it's like setting our country on fire and giving every extranational hacker a roman candle – or, rather, not setting on fire, but dousing in gasoline."
