Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s had his account hacked. Several tweets have been sent from his verified @Jack account, many of them containing racist epithets, threats, and extortion demands.
We're aware that @jack was compromised and investigating what happened.
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) August 30, 2019
At approximately 12:45 PST today, tweets coming from the account seemed to be the work of either a hacker or a disgruntled employee. The attack appears to be a coordinated effort between several accounts, with many of those participating being immediately banned.
At this time it’s unknown if this is a prank or if threats contained in the messages are real. As of 1:15 PST (about 30 minutes after the first tweet) the offending tweets have been deleted. We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information and will update this post as necessary.
Update 1:25 PST: The attack was reportedly initiated by someone with access to software from a third party company that Twitter’s worked with:
.@Jack’s account has been hacked.
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
— Sam (@Hooray) August 30, 2019
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