Twitter Disables Tweet-via-SMS After CEO Jack Dorsey Got Hacked

Sep. 5, 2019

Less than a week after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account on the micro-blogging platform washacked by a notorious hacking groupcalled‘Chuckle Squad’, the company announced that it has temporarily turned off the tweet-via-SMS functionality that is believed to have been exploited by the miscreants to send a series of disturbing tweets from Dorsey’s account last Friday.

In a message on Wednesday, the company said that the step is necessary to ensure that telecom service providers address the vulnerabilities at their end to prevent the steady stream of hacks faced by celebrities and public personalities in the US over the past few weeks. The company also said that it working on a better way to ensure two-factor authentication (2FA) for enhanced security.

The so-called Chuckle Squad has been on a hacking spree of late, attacking the Twitter accounts of a number of celebrities and public personalities over the past month, including beauty vlogger James Charles, Shane Dawson, comedian King Back and most recently, actress Chloe Moretz. Rogue AT&T employees are thought to be behind most of the hacks, which is why Twitter is emphasizing that role of the mobile operators in the whole episode.

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