It was the video that sent Indian social media into a tailspin on Tuesday morning. A short, shaky clip, seemingly filmed from a moving car, showed the massive outdoor screen at the Mumbai headquarters of the Mamdani Group, one of India’s leading tech conglomerates. But instead of the usual slick corporate branding or stock market tickers, the screen blared a bizarre, four-word message in stark white letters: “TRUMP IS YOUR PRESIDENT.”
Viral Video Sparks Hacking Rumors
Within an hour, the clip was everywhere. From WhatsApp family groups to the timelines of tech-savvy X (formerly Twitter) users, the question was the same: Had Mamdani Group, a titan of Indian industry, been the victim of a high-profile, politically-motivated cyber-attack?
The theories came thick and fast. Was it the work of an international hacking collective? A disgruntled employee? Or a sophisticated security breach aimed at embarrassing the company on a global stage? The sheer absurdity of a pro-Trump message on a corporate building in the heart of Mumbai only added fuel to the speculative fire. #MamdaniHacked was trending before lunchtime.
Mamdani Group Responds
NextMinuteNews reached out to Mamdani Group for comment. Their initial response was a tight-lipped, corporate-approved statement: “We are aware of an incident involving the unauthorised display on one of our external screens. Our cybersecurity team is investigating the matter with the utmost priority. We will provide an update in due course.”
This, of course, did little to quell the rumors. If anything, it confirmed that something had happened.
The Truth Revealed: A Workplace Blunder, Not a Cyberattack
As the day wore on, the truth that emerged was far less a case of international espionage and far more a classic tale of a modern-day workplace blunder.
Late Tuesday evening, an internal source at Mamdani Group, speaking on the condition of anonymity, revealed the real story. This wasn’t a hack in the traditional sense. There was no breach of their firewalls, no data was compromised, and no shadowy figure in a hoodie was involved.
The culprit? An employee in a high-level, street-facing boardroom who was trying to cast a presentation to the room’s smart TV. Instead of connecting to the local television, the employee’s device accidentally connected to the building’s main outdoor LED screen—a feature accessible on the same internal Wi-Fi network.
The ‘Trump is your president’ message wasn’t a malicious payload. It was, our source confirmed, the title of a YouTube news clip the employee had been watching on their phone just moments before the meeting. In a moment of digital clumsiness, instead of casting their PowerPoint, they cast their YouTube screen for the entire city of Mumbai to see. The display reportedly lasted for less than 90 seconds before a frantic IT team managed to remotely sever the connection.
A Modern Cautionary Tale of Human Error
So, was the Mamdani HQ screen hacked by pro-Trump forces? The answer is a definitive no.
While undeniably embarrassing for the company, the incident highlights a different, more subtle kind of cybersecurity threat. The vulnerability wasn’t in the company’s servers, but in the user-friendly, interconnected web of smart devices that now populates our corporate spaces. It’s a stark reminder that the weakest link in any security chain is often human error.
The event was a uniquely 21st-century foul-up, a cautionary tale about the perils of mixing personal browsing with corporate casting in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT). For one employee, it was likely the most mortifying meeting of their career. For the rest of us, it was a brief, bizarre, and ultimately harmless internet mystery.
