Twitter CEO’s Twitter Account Gets Hacked

It feels a bit ironic when you’re the CEO of a microblogging network and it’s your account that ends up getting hacked because you of all people should know better. This slightly embarrassing situation was faced by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey after his official Twitter account was briefly compromised by hacking collective OurMine. This group of hackers has already compromised quite a few high-profile Twitter accounts recently but this is perhaps the most embarrassing yet for Twitter itself.

OurMine confirmed that it had been able to compromise Dorsey’s Twitter account by tweeting a link to its website though Dorsey’s account with the message: “testing your security.”

The group didn’t have control over the account for long. Shortly after the tweet was posted it was taken offline, and even though they kept sending out identical tweets they were rapidly being deleted.

It’s unclear precisely how OurMine was able to compromise Dorsey’s account but it does appear that all of the tweets sent through his account actually came through for Vine. This means that perhaps they were able to gain access through Vine or another connected service.

OurMine is the same group that’s behind similar hacks on accounts of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Since the group hasn’t done anything nefarious or downright embarrassing using the compromised accounts perhaps the only thing it wants to do is point out to these people that they need to shore up their security, but nobody can truly speak to their intentions.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: General
Tags: Hacking, Twitter