Twitter’s CEO (chief executive officer) and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s Twitter has been hacked and was used to send several abusive and racist tweets.
About the abusive tweets
Jack’s Twitter account was hacked for 20 minutes. The Twitter team regained control to it. Jack has about 4.2M followers on his Twitter account. Although at that time, several racist and abusive tweets have already been sent. The hacking group chuckle squad was behind it.
The Twitter team has already deleted the abusive tweets. But till the time, it was too late as some of the users have already taken the screenshots of tweets. One tweet say that Adolf Hitler was innocent.
The hacking technique used
The simple hacking technique used in this attack was SIM swapping. It is the technique when a hacker collects your personal information and then tell the telecom operator to issue new SIM to them. They convince the telecom operator with the information that they have already obtained.
Then the chuckle squad (hacking group) used the grasshopper service. The grasshopper helps the users to post the tweets without internet by just sending an SMS. Users can post tweets by using shortcode number, usually 40404.
Every tweet by grasshopper has the by grasshopper below every tweet. It’s a simple trick when you don’t have internet or Twitter app (for simple phones also). This only requires your phone number linked to Twitter account.
It is still unclear, how the hackers swapped the SIM. It can be either by bribing the telecom operator employees or by posing as the genuine user.
The shares of the Twitter fell by 1 percent after the hack.
How to stay safe
you should use 2 Factor authentication by Google authenticator or Authy. You should set the account recovery option so that hacker cannot use their account for the recovery.
These incidents are the warnings that no account is safe and we should use the best cybersecurity practices to keep our account safe.
