Can Trump Be Hacked? President Uses Old Android Phone For Tweeting, Raising Security Concerns

President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning about Chelsea Manning, whose sentence for leaking classified material was commuted last week by former President Barack Obama. The tweet, which called Manning a traitor, was retweeted almost ten thousand times in less than two hours, and will likely dominate the news cycle, as Trump's tweets tend to do. It could also put the nation in danger.

A tweet from the president is an incredibly powerful tool, but it isn't very secure, the New York Times reported Wednesday. Because Trump continues to Tweet from an unsecured Android phone, he could expose himself, and the nation, to cyber security threats, the report found.

Trump doesn’t make calls on the phone, but it’s unclear what security measures have been added to the phone, if any. One smartphone blog, Android Central, claims Trump is using a Samsung Galaxy S3, which was first released in 2012 and is "a good three years out of step with the latest Android security features." If the phone is compromised, which becomes more likely if the president logs onto an unsecure Wi-Fi network, hackers could turn on the phone’s camera and microphone, track the president’s location or use keylogging software to read the president's tweets before they are sent and use that knowledge to make bets on the stock market.

“As president, he is the biggest sitting target in the world,” Kevin Bankston, director of New America’s Open Technology Institute, told the Times.

Trump is only the second president to carry a smartphone, after Obama, but Obama used a heavily modified Samsung Galaxy S4 provided to him by government security specialists. The phone could only make calls, open emails and attachments and browse the web, Quartz said.

A spokesman for Twitter would not discuss special security measures for Trump, but told Newsweek: "We have a government team based in Washington that works with candidates, Congress, agencies, and the White House on best practices for Twitter, including account security."