Twitter boss Jack Dorsey's account was briefly hacked

5 months ago

The man who founded and runs Twitter has found himself at the centre of an embarrassing episode – having his account hacked.

Jack Dorsey, who founded the site in 2006, had his Twitter and Vine accounts briefly compromised by the same group that has previously caught out Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The OurMine Group used the breach of Dorsey’s account to post a standard message that it was “testing your security” and only posted Vine videos to the account, which were swiftly deleted.

Much like their previous high-profile break-ins, it appears that Twitter itself was not the source of the breach – that appears to have been Vine, which Twitter also owns.

OurMine appears to have posted to Vine and then linked the posts to Twitter in order to get onto Dorsey’s main feed.

It has been noted in some reports that while many users log into Vine using Twitter in order to use the two-factor authentication, some older Vine users (of which Dorsey is likely to be one), may log in with a separate username and password. This could be how OurMine got in.

It’s alleged that when OurMine gained access to Mark Zuckerberg’s almost abandoned Twitter account – the Facebok CEO hasn’t tweeted in four years – it was with data gained from a security breach to LinkedIn in 2012.