As soon as racial slurs and anti-semitic tweets started coming out from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account, people knew that his account had been hijacked somehow.
While some tweets were up for as long as 10 minutes, including one Holocaust denial, Twitter acted quickly and the hijacked tweets went down almost as soon as they came out until all of them were deleted. The group that did the hack calls itself the Chuckle Squad.
Twitter released an announcement about an hour-and-a-half after the hack was discovered, saying, “the account is now secure, and there is no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised.”
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Video credit: Rumble
The company then added later that the fault was with Dorsey’s cell carrier because “the phone number associated with the account was compromised due to security oversight by the mobile provider,” and this gave hackers the opportunity to send tweets via text messages.
It seems the hackers used a service called Cloudhopper to send the tweets. Twitter previously acquired that company for its SMS service. If you send a text to 404-04 using the phone number linked to your Twitter account, that text will get posted as a tweet and the tweet’s source will be reflected as “Cloudhopper.”
The hacks seemed to be perpetrated by the same group that went after a couple of YouTubers such as beauty vlogger James Charles, comedian King Bach, and Shane Dawson. The late Desmond “Etika” Amofah’s Gmail account seems to have been compromised as well based on the screenshots posted in the group’s Discord server.
The people whose accounts have been breached believe it was due to a SIM card swap that AT&T employees conducted.
AT&T spokesperson said, “We are working with law enforcement, have restored the customers’ service, and discussed ways to secure the account.”
Riverdale’s Cole Sprouse also blamed his “cell service provider” for the hack on his Twitter account although it’s not clear if the same group was responsible.
The hackers even put up a Discord server, now removed, inviting people to join it. A Discord representative said, “Both the server and the server owner were permanently removed from Discord within minutes of this being reported to us.”
“Encouraging any kind of hacking is in direct violation of our Terms of Service,” the representative said. “We will continue to monitor and investigate this incident.”
However, this isn’t the first time that Dorsey’s account has been hacked. Security firm OurMine managed to hack @Jack in 2016 and used it to send a message “testing your security” that included a video and link to OurMine’s website. The security firm had also hacked other CEOs including Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
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