Just recently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account on the service was briefly taken over by hackers and it has us wondering just how safe the platform may be, or not. Twitter, a microblogging and social networking service, is used by over 321 million monthly users all over the world and an attack on its very mothership is on the borderline of worrisome. In one way or another, it’s outsmarting the smart, if we may. Let’s get more into the issue to find out the details of what had happened.
What happened?
Jack Dorsey, CEO of popular microblogging and social media platform, Twitter was hacked on the service by a group referring to itself as the Chuckling Squad. Taking full responsibility that it was, in fact, them that were behind the breach of Jack Dorsey’s account, the group tweeted out unauthorized tweets via text message from a sham phone number.
How did it happen?
According to direct sources from the company, the group of hackers used a technique known as sim swapping or sim jacking in order to take over Dorsey’s account. The same sources speculate that hackers tricked or bribed the customer support staff of Dorsey’s mobile provider to transfer the number associated with his account to a new Sim card. Once the hackers took control of the number, they simply logged in with it through their own mobiles, enabling them to post tweets via text message directly on to Dorsey’s Twitter account.
The aftermath of the attack
The hackers under the name, The Chuckling Squad, took to Dorsey’s account a series of anti-Semitic comments referencing the Holocaust, and even referred to the n-word. Some of the tweets were posted directly by the @jack account, while others were retweeted from various further accounts. One post had even suggested that there was a bomb placed in the social media company’s headquarters that would be going off imminently. Though the problem has now been fixed and address, it still is an embarrassing moment for Twitter, indeed.
