Some hackers compromised Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's Twitter account on Friday and used the platform to make racial slurs, bomb threats, and otherwise be grossly offensive.
As the New York Times reports, the hackers accessed Dorsey's account using the third-party SMS service CloudHopper that Twitter acquired in 2010, and the tweets have all been deleted. As of 2:22 p.m., the company tweeted that the account was now secure, and no greater breach had been detected.
The account is now secure, and there is no indication that Twitter's systems have been compromised.
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) August 30, 2019
As The Verge reports, in addition to posting various offensive and incendiary things, the hackers urged people to join a channel on Discord, the Slack competitor that became popular in recent years among gamers. They appeared to identify themselves by the name "Chuckling Squad."
.@Jack’s account has been hacked.
— Sam (@Hooray) August 30, 2019
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
Dorsey's account was similarly hacked in 2016, leading to his account being briefly suspended — at which point alt-right Twitterers and others delighted in the idea that he might have been accidentally "suspended from his own platform."
Just today, a Twitter user with the handle "Clittory Hilton" and an avatar of Hillary Clinton with devil horns tweeted in response to the hackers' posts, "Jack must be banned for hate speech. I can’t believe he would tweet this."
Photo: Rory Cellan
