Twitter CEO’s hacked account sends racist tweets before being secured

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The account of Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) Chief Executive Jack Dorsey was hacked on Friday afternoon, sending public tweets and retweets together with racial slurs and curse phrases to four million followers before Twitter secured the account.

The social media firm, co-founded by Dorsey, mentioned the telephone quantity related together with his account was compromised as a consequence of a safety oversight by the cell supplier.

“This allowed an unauthorized person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved,” the corporate mentioned, including individually that there was no indication that Twitter’s methods had been compromised.

One of the 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 throughout the obvious hacks of a number of YouTube stars final week.

The hack underscored potential vulnerabilities within the social media platform, which is extensively 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 indicate they have been despatched by means of Cloudhopper, a cell textual content messaging service that Twitter acquired in 2010. Twitter didn’t instantly reply when requested to verify if the hack occurred through Cloudhopper.

Security 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 telephone 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 bunch that additionally hacked the Twitter accounts of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Twitter shares have been down lower than 1% in after-hours commerce following the hack.