Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey’s account sent out a stream of offensive tweets on Friday in what the company said was a hack.
More than 15 tweets, many containing swear words and racist comments, were posted shortly before 4pm New York time.
The company started deleting the tweets from Dorsey’s verified Twitter account, which has more than 4 million followers, about 20 minutes after the messages went viral.
“Yes, Jack’s account was compromised,” Twitter spokesman Brandon Borrman wrote on Twitter. “We’re working on it and investigating what happened.”
The company later said there was “no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised,” but said it needed to investigate further before saying what happened.
Some of the tweets used anti-black slurs, praised Adolf Hitler and talked about a bomb at Twitter’s headquarters.
Many of them referenced the Chuckling Squad, a group that took credit for the hack of several YouTube and Instagram stars last month.
A Twitter spokesman said the company was unlikely to have answers about what happened to its chief executive officer’s account for a few more days.
Twitter users expressed concern that an even more prominent and prolific user — US President Donald Trump — could be just as easily hacked, affecting global political relations.
Trump, who often uses the service to publicize policy decisions, expressed little concern about that scenario.
“Well, I hope they’re not hacking my account, but actually if they do, they’re not going to learn too much more than what I put out, right?” Trump told reporters on Friday evening as he left the White House. “Shouldn’t be too bad.”
Twitter declined to comment on the security measures Dorsey uses.
His account was hacked in 2016 through a connection to his Vine account, so he likely uses some form of two-factor authentication.
That suggests a more sophisticated attack.
One possibility is a SIM-card swap, in which a hacker called Dorsey’s wireless carrier and convinced them to switch his number to a new SIM card.
Such swaps are possible because hackers can gather personal information on the dark web and use it to validate the account, Gartner research vice president Lawrence Pingree said.
“You can call in and say: ‘I bought a new phone and I need a new SIM card assigned to this number,’” he said.
If the caller provides the correct information, they might succeed, and the problem is made worse because call centers handle so many calls, Pingree added.
The tweets were sent via a service called Cloudhopper that allows tweeting via SMS. Twitter acquired Cloudhopper in 2010.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing