A hacker has infiltrated Jack Dorsey’s own Twitter account.
It’s not clear how it happened, but the hacker posted over a dozen tweets in quick succession, including racial slurs. Not only that, it means the unnamed hacker also has access to the Twitter chief executive’s private direct messages.
One of the tweets posted a Twitter handle for someone who purported to take credit for the account takeover. That account was quickly suspended.
Dorsey has over 4.21 million followers.
The rogue tweets were sent via Cloudhopper, a service Twitter bought to improve its SMS service, suggesting Dorsey’s account may have been compromised by an authorized third-party app rather than obtaining Dorsey’s account password.
It’s not the first time Twitter had to clean up after a high-profile account was hacked. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg once had his Twitter account hacked because his account didn’t use two-factor authentication. He also had a ridiculously easy-to-guess password.
It’s not known how Dorsey’s account was hacked. Often the cause is a password reuse attack, where hackers take breached usernames and passwords from one website and run them against another site. Accounts who share passwords from site to site are more likely to get hacked.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for more but did not immediately hear back.
Source: Tech Crunch