Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked on Friday afternoon by a group that calls itself the Chuckle Squad.
The hackers tweeted racial slurs, antisemitic messages and at least one Holocaust denial from Dorsey’s account.
Some offensive tweets were up for about 10 minutes, though not long after the hack began, those tweets were already being deleted, and they’re all gone now.
Roughly an hour and a half after the hack, Twitter tweeted that “the account is now secure, and there is no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised.”
One potential clue lay in the tweets themselves, which displayed as having been sent from the Cloudhopper client.
Roughly an hour and a half after the hack, Twitter tweeted that “the account is now secure, and there is no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised.”
One potential clue lay in the tweets themselves, which displayed as having been sent from the Cloudhopper client.
Cloudhopper was a messaging infrastructure company that Twitter acquired in 2010 to better integrate its service with SMS.
That’s led to some speculation that Dorsey was somehow still signed into Cloudhopper for all these years, and the hackers got a hold of that account. But that’s not quite right.
On Friday evening, the company attributed fault for the hack to Dorsey’s mobile phone company.
“The phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight by the mobile provider,” the company said “This allowed an unauthorized person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved.”
