Account of Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey Taken Over by Hackers

• Hackers took advantage of a mobile communications operator flaw and published messages on Jack Dorsey’s account.
• The tweets were very inappropriate and shocking to the millions of Dorsey’s followers.
• The incident shakes people’s trust in the social media platform, as the world’s most important people are also using it.

An incident which proves that no one is safe from hackers, the account of Jack Dorsey on Twitter was hacked. Jack Dorsey is the co-founder and current CEO of Twitter, so this was the highest-profile account that a hacker could have compromised in this social media platform. The hacker indulged in racist messages that socked the 4.21 million followers of the account, with the stream of tweets continuing for a couple of hours before Twitter took action and secured it. In the same time, they suspended another handle that claimed the hack.

https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1167528672523210752

Reportedly, Jack Dorsey was using two-factor authentication to protect his high-profile account, so the hacker has managed to somehow carry out a successful SIM swapping attack against him. Moreover, Twitter said that the hacker used Cloudhopper to send the rogue messages, which is an SMS messaging service that Twitter bought a decade ago. The social media giant has clarified that there was no compromise of any of their systems and that the incident was the result of a security blunder from the side of the mobile provider, whom they don’t name.

This reminded us of the 2016 security incident when Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter account was taken over by hackers, along with his Pinterest and LinkedIn. The difference with that was that Zuckerberg wasn’t using a two-factor authentication step, so his Twitter account was a lot more vulnerable. Still, and no matter the details, this latest incident of Jack Dorsey’s account getting hacked has generated negative publicity for Twitter and has also caused a rip in the trust that people have in the platform.

The very tweets that the hackers posted are embarrassing anyway, as they warned that a bomb was planted at the Twitter headquarters. Anti-Semitic comments that referenced the Holocaust as well as the n-word, weren’t left out of the hackers’ repertoire. In the end, Twitter is extensively used by political leaders like Donald Trump, so realizing the ability of hackers to take over any account is ground-shaking.

Do you trust Twitter or do you prefer to hang around on a different social media platform? Let us know in the comments below, or hop to our own Twitter handle or Facebook page and take part in the discussion.