Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's account hacked, bomb threats and racist slurs tweeted
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's account was hacked on Friday afternoon and the handle saw strange activity. Bomb threats were posted, racial slurs used and there were some suspicious retweets as well.
The hackers reportedly referred to themselves as the "Chuckle Gang" and asked Twitter to remove the suspension on certain accounts. The first tweet read, "Intel is there's a bomb at Twitter HQ #ChucklingHella #ChucklinSquad." This has since been deleted, however, there has been further activity on the account. One tweet read, "Nazi Germany did nothing wrong.” One retweet said, "James Charles got some nice b**ty" and another tweet said "If I Go Jail I'll Still Be Chuckling #ChucklingHella."
The racist comments that were made by the hackers was directed at African-Americans and Jews and this came right after the account tweeted out about Nazi Germany. According to a report in the Independent, the hackers also directed users who were seeing the tweets to a discussion board, which was removed by Twitter before the tweets themselves.
Some of the tweets were up for about 30 minutes before Twitter took them down. The tweets included messages such as "Hitler is innocent" and, using a vulgarity, asked "bald skeleton head," referring to Dorsey, to unsuspend certain accounts.
According to Variety, the tweets were made using a mobile messaging app called CloudHopper, which Twitter had acquired in 2010. The hackers may not have used Cloudhopper directly but may have used a backend interface of the app that was not secured properly.
Twitter says it's investigating. The company suspended accounts that the hacker or hackers retweeted while they had control of Dorsey's account. Speaking about the hack, Vice President of Global Communications of Twitter, Brandon Bormann, tweeted, "Yes, Jack's account was compromised. We're working on it and investigating what happened.
In the past, Twitter has had issues with various celebrities and popular handles being hacked and this includes the streaming network Netflix, television network HBO and Marvel. However, these hacks were done to highlight how Twitter was lax when it comes to security.
The hack on Dorsey's account, however, spread hate messages by tweeting racial slurs to 4 million followers that the Twitter CEO enjoys on the microblogging site. The incident comes as Twitter and Dorsey have promised to improve the "health" and civility of discourse on the social media service, cracking down on hate speech and abuse.
With inputs from AP
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.