Trump's Twitter password baffled hackers; it was his favourite catchphrase

The hackers knew that they were potentially in trouble, because it could be interpreted as a cyber attack on a presidential candidate.

"You're fired!" Donald Trump became famous bellowing those words in a make-believe boardroom. But who would have guessed that the catchphrase, including three 'magical' words, made the secret guide to the US president's Twitter account.

A Dutch magazine on Friday reported that three Dutch hackers had broken into Trump's Twitter account shortly before he became the president in 2016, only by guessing his password 'yourefired'— commonly used words on his TV show 'The Apprentice'.

The hackers, named Edwin, Mattijs, and Victor, used a leaked list of LinkedIn accounts from 2012 to target Trump, then a presidential candidate and then warn him in an email that they had broken in.

The hackers, belonging to a group named 'Guild Of The Grumpy Old Hackers', also shared screenshots to show how they broke into Trump's account on October 27, 2016, shortly before the presidential vote.

They took the password from the leaked LinkedIn database, which contained 117 million names and passwords.

"They were shocked when they succeeded," Janssen told the Dutch magazine. "They knew that they could be in trouble because it could be seen as a cyber attack on a presidential candidate," he added

The hackers, who documented their actions thoroughly, never heard from Trump himself, but the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) had replied to them in November 2016, thanking them for getting in touch. All three, who now work in online security trying to detect weaknesses in corporate and government software, have also been able to visit America without any trouble.

Trump was not among a list of famous names, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Apple, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama, whose Twitter accounts were hacked in July this year.