Recently,  a handful of Gizmodo Tech Journalists went for a leisurely boat ride, skirting the perimeter of Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate. 

They weren’t looking for the President or his entourage. 

Please!  They had better things to do. 

Their mission was to test the security parameters of the estate’s wireless system.  And what they found was pretty pathetic and downright sloppy. 

Here is what happened, via Gizmodo: 

“We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, and pointed a two-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.”

And then:

“We drove through the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., with the same antenna and aimed it at the clubhouse. We identified two open Wi-Fi networks that anyone could join without a password. We resisted the temptation.”

And furthermore:

“We also visited two of President Donald Trump’s other family-run retreats, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a golf club in Sterling, Va. Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.”

The article goes on and on and is a very interesting, albeit worrisome, read. 

However, as the article states,  a low level of wirelss security is fairly common place in the hospitality industry.  But when you are President of The United States and are hell bent on wining and dining foreign dignitaries at your estates, perhaps it would not be a bad idea to spend a few dollars and heighten the security protocols for your wireless service. 

Just a thought. 

Thanks to the Gizmodo crew for their excellent reporting on an issue that, in truth, is a national security issue.