Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey falls prey to SIM swap fraud, hackers gain account access for 20 min

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is a prolific tweeter, but just an hour ago, his account was seeing a lot of activity. Most of the tweets were single line tweets with some of the tweets having blatantly racist language. It seemed far from drunk tweeting.

Yes, Twitter CEO's Twitter account was hacked for a while. Dorsey has around 4.2 million followers.

Twitter's communications team confirmed that Dorsey's account was indeed compromised and they were investigating the matter.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Image: Reuters

A group going by the name Chuckle Squad was tweeting anti-Semitic and racist tweets, retweeting accounts and even asking for some handles to be unsuspended. The tweets were live for a good 20 mins (even more) before the Twitter security team got into action.

Looks like @twitter CEO @jack's account has been hacked pic.twitter.com/QfKx3n20w6

— Nimish (@nimsaw) August 30, 2019

The tweetstorm from the hacker began with a tweet which had a link to a Discord chat group. According to Buzzfeed, Discord took down the server which was hosting these chats.

.@Jack’s account has been hacked.

The Tweets are coming from a source called Cloudhopper. Cloudhopper was the name of the company Twitter acquired a long time ago to help bolster their SMS service.

Looks like the hackers are Tweeting via the old SMS service... pic.twitter.com/YcU3DTn9wS

— Sam (@Hooray) August 30, 2019

According to The Verge, the attackers seem to be the same group that recently attacked many YouTubers and influencers on Twitter. Some influencers who were attacked, claimed that their accounts were breached after a SIM swap that was done by AT&T.

Twitter keeps talking about the measures it is taking to contain abuse and hate on the platform. But it was rather ironic to see the platform's CEO's handle itself tweeting racist and anti-Semitic tweets. While things are under control now, it is certainly a huge embarrassment for Twitter. I mean, if the Twitter CEO himself can be hacked, that puts a big question mark on the company's security practices. The matter is still under investigation, and Twitter should put out an official statement of what exactly went down, as tomorrow it could be anyone's account.

Update 1: As expected, it appears that Dorsey was a victim of SIM swap fraud. Twitter has confirmed that a phone number associated with the account was compromised "due to a security oversight by a mobile provider." Twitter itself wasn't hacked and no data was stolen. The hacker sent tweets via SMS.

 

The phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight by the mobile provider. This allowed an unauthorized person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved.

— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) August 31, 2019

The story is developing. We will update the story as the updates come through.

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