A successful attack on your system’s servers represents a threat to all of your users’ privacy and data security… Did this attack threaten the security of the President’s own Twitter account? — Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri
Hawley made the remarks as Twitter was dealing with a massive Twitter hack of prominent accounts to tweet Bbitcoin scams.
Victor Reklaitis for MarketWatch:
President Donald Trump, who often makes news with his posts on the social-media platform, didn’t appear to have been among the users hacked, but presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama both had accounts taken over.
Hawley posed a range of questions to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey through a letter that he shared on Twitter. “How many users may have faced data theft as a consequence of this breach?” the GOP senator asked…
The CEOs of Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., and Facebook Inc. are slated to testify on July 27 before the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee.
MacDailyNews Take: Barry Collins, writing for Forbes, says the president’s account must have some extra security above and beyond regular users, blue checkmarks or not, to have remained secure during this Twitter hack:
While many of the biggest Twitter accounts were vandalized with messages urging people to participate in what appears to be a bitcoin scam, the @realDonaldTrump account and its 83.5 million followers were not targeted. Neither was the official account of the president @POTUS and its 30.8m audience.
The question looms large: why did the scammers not target the most high-profile account of them all?
The president would undoubtedly be the service’s prime target for hackers, so it is possible that Twitter has afforded Mr Trump and his staff some form of extra verification that made it more difficult to breach his account… Twitter may, for example, only permit tweets to be made to Trump’s accounts from authorized devices, meaning that the hackers weren’t able to tweet on the president’s behalf.