Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was hacked on his own platform, his company said, with a torrent of strange tweets sent from his account. Twitter said it is investigating the matter further.
Dorsey’s Twitter account began putting out inflammatory tweets on Friday afternoon, just before 4pm, according to CNBC. Some of the posts spoke approvingly of the Nazis, while others included racial slurs.
The tweets have since been deleted.
Twitter declared the account “secure” around 5:30 pm EDT on Friday, adding there were no indications the company’s computer systems had been compromised.
The offending tweets were sent through Cloudhopper, originally a third-party app that Twitter bought in 2010.
The hack appears to have been carried out by a group known as ‘Chuckling Squad’ on chat platform Discord; during the intrusion Dorsey’s account repeatedly tweeted out the name of the group as hashtags.
This is the same group that seems to have been responsible for last month’s hack of the London Metropolitan Police, which took over the Twitter account as well as the website of the largest UK police force.Apparently using an automated press release feature, the hackers used the Met Police Twitter to post obscenities, racial slurs and references to themselves or their friends.