Following one other hack of a high-profile account, Twitter has quickly turned off a characteristic letting customers tweet instantly from textual content messages, arguing cellular carriers must “address vulnerabilities” earlier than bringing it again.
The firm introduced the suspension in a string of tweets on Wednesday afternoon, after the account of actress Chloe Grace Moretz was hacked and posted a spate of vulgar messages which have since been deleted.
“We’re temporarily turning off the ability to Tweet via SMS, or text message, to protect people’s accounts,” the corporate said, explaining there have been “vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers.”
The social media platform added that it could work to prioritize reintroducing the characteristic in areas “that depend on SMS for reliable communication.”
Twitter’s personal CEO Jack Dorsey was hacked final week, ensuing in a collection of racially-charged, expletive-laden tweets, together with reward for Nazi Germany. That hack seems to be linked to Cloudhopper, a service that permits customers to publish tweets through textual content message, which Twitter acquired in 2010.
A text-to-tweet characteristic additionally appears to be the exploit used to take over the account of London’s Metropolitan Police final month. All of the intrusions seem like the work of a group often called “Chuckling Squad” on the chat platform Discord. The group’s title and hashtags have been talked about in each occasion, whereas the hackers had been in management of the compromised accounts.
Common to all of the breaches was the tweet-by-text characteristic, which Twitter suggests nonetheless incorporates a number of safety loopholes.