Here’s How Trump’s Twitter Account Could Be Hacked
We need to talk about the third-party services that the U.S. president uses to tweet
Last Friday hackers broke into Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account. We now know the hackers probably used a SIM swap technique in which they essentially steal or spoof a phone number, so that any sent messages appear to come from the phone of their victim. By stealing Dorsey’s number, it meant that when they texted Twitter’s SMS service, it posted tweets directly to his account.
SIM swaps are not particularly sophisticated. They don’t require any complex computing tricks. They could have simply called AT&T — Dorsey’s mobile provider — while pretending to be the Twitter CEO, and asked the company to transfer his number to a different SIM.
The good news, then, is that this incident doesn’t automatically mean that Twitter’s core infrastructure contains a security flaw that could put us all at risk. It’s unlikely, for example, that the hackers were able to access Dorsey’s direct messages, or had obtained access to…
