SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The account of Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) Chief Govt Jack Dorsey was hacked on Friday afternoon, sending public tweets and retweets together with racial slurs and curse phrases to four million followers earlier than Twitter secured the account.
The social media firm, co-founded by Dorsey, mentioned the cellphone quantity related along with his account was compromised as a consequence of a safety oversight by the cell supplier.
“This allowed an unauthorized particular person to compose and ship tweets by way of textual content message from the cellphone quantity. That concern is now resolved,” the corporate mentioned, including individually that there was no indication that Twitter’s techniques had been compromised.
One of many tweets from the hacked account mentioned Nazi chief Adolf Hitler was harmless, whereas others contained derogatory feedback about black individuals and Jews. There was additionally a tweet suggesting there was a bomb at Twitter’s headquarters.
The account posted a hashtag that was used in the course of the obvious hacks of a number of YouTube stars final week.
The hack underscored potential vulnerabilities within the social media platform, which is broadly utilized by world leaders and politicians, together with U.S. President Donald Trump. It comes at a time when social media corporations are dealing with scrutiny over administration of their networks, privateness points and safety of person knowledge.
The offensive tweets and retweets have been deleted lower than an hour after the incident. Some Twitter accounts named within the compromised tweets and retweets appeared suspended on Friday.
Screenshots of the tweets appeared to point out they have been despatched by Cloudhopper, a cell textual content messaging service that Twitter acquired in 2010. Twitter didn’t instantly reply when requested to substantiate if the hack occurred by way of Cloudhopper.
Safety researcher Brian Krebs mentioned it appeared that Dorsey was the sufferer of a SIM swapping assault through which a cell supplier is tricked or in any other case satisfied to switch a sufferer’s cellphone quantity to a SIM card managed by another person.
The Friday incident was not the primary time that Dorsey’s Twitter account has been hacked. His account was compromised in 2016 by a gaggle that additionally hacked the Twitter accounts of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Fb CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Twitter shares have been down lower than 1{5048a9ac22a95e6c0a00d427d71a0d7ff263f9d98391fe7073acb5a0aa0a3f48} in after-hours commerce following the hack.
Reporting by Peter Henderson, Joe Menn and Elizabeth Culliford in San Francisco; Extra reporting by Tamara Mathias, Ankit Ajmera and Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; Enhancing by Matthew Lewis, Rosalba O’Brien and Will Dunham