It’s always worrying when a social media company cannot keep its own employees from being hacked; especially its own CEO.
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, got an unpleasant shock when a group of hackers/vandals managed to gain access to his Twitter account. During this time they posted a plethora of offensive messages and plugs for their Discord channel. 15 minutes after the first post, Twitter had managed to take control of the account again.
The hackers got in through Twitter’s text-to-tweet service, operated by the acquired service Cloudhopper. With Cloudhopper, Twitter users can post tweets by texting messages to an SMS number, usually 40404. It’s a useful trick for “SimplePhones” or if you just don’t have access to the Twitter app.
The hackers got access to Dorsey’s account by convincing a carrier to assigning Dorsey’s number to a new phone that they controlled. This kind of attack is called SIM hacking.
Making it easier to post on Twitter also made it more vulnerable to hacking. The problem is that SIM Swapping Hacking has been around for ages and is relatively easy to do.
