Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked on Friday evening. His account was reportedly infiltrated by a group that calls itself the Chuckle Squad. While it wasn’t under his control, the hackers used Dorsey’s account to tweet antisemitic messages, racial slurs and at least one Holocaust denial.
As expected, the offensive tweets have already been deleted but they were up for about 10 minutes.
Close to two hours after, the hack, Twitter tweeted that “the account is now secure, and there is no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised.”
So, how did this hack occur? According to Twitter this should all be blamed on the CEO’s telecom carrier, saying that “the phone number associated with the account was compromised due to security oversight by the mobile provider,” which apparently allowed the hackers to send the tweets using text messages.
The offensive tweets came from Cloudhopper, an Twitter owned company in charge of its SMS service. If you text 404-04 from the phone number linked to your Twitter account, that text will post to Twitter. The source in the tweet will be given as “Cloudhopper.”
This is not the first time the same hackers have done something similar, they previously hacked several YouTube celebrities last week on Twitter, including beauty vlogger James Charles, Shane Dawson, and comedian King Bach. At the time, many of the people who’d been affected suggested their accounts were breached following a SIM card swap conducted by telecom employees at AT&T.
