Twitter has launched an investigation after its co-founder, high profile crypto fan Jack Dorsey, had his account hacked and racist tweets were posted.
The messages – which included false reports of a bomb threat at Twitter HQ and defences of Adolf Hitler – were last night deleted from the social media platform after about 30 minutes. Many of them included references to The Chuckling Squad, a group of hackers believed to be behind the incident.
“We’re aware that @jack was compromised and [are] investigating what happened,” Twitter said in a statement. “The account is now secure, and there is no indication that our systems have been compromised.”
“The phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight by the mobile provider,” it added. “This allowed an unauthorised person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved.”
The incident follows on from Twitter and Dorsey’s promise to improve the health of discourse on the social network by cracking down on hate speech and abuse.
No jerks, please
In June, we reported that Dorsey, who is also founder of mobile payments venture Square, had been discussing his plans for the company’s team of crypto developers and designers, who will work on open source contributions to the ecosystem.
“Just from a business perspective, we don’t look like an internet company today. An internet company can launch something and it’s available around the world,” he told The Next Web.”Whereas with payments, you have to go to each market and pay attention to regulators. You need a partnership with a local bank. This is a very slow process in any new market. The internet having a native currency will enable us to be more like an Internet company.”
He added: “The one word that sums up everything we’ve been trying to do at Square is ‘access.’ And I don’t think there’s a greater technology out there that enables the kind of access we need at the individual level – that is borderless, that is not controlled by any one particular company, and that was born on the internet, and continues to be developed on the internet – than [cryptocurrency]”
Square had already hired the first developer, who will serve as a team leader: Steve Lee, previously a director at Google. “We’ve interviewed tens of candidates,” Dorsey said. “Bitcoin is interesting because a lot of the innovation isn’t being driven in the US. We wanted to make sure that we had a global mindset. We also had to create a structure.”
Dorsey has responsibility for building the rest of the team, as well as establishing the direction of the project.
“We’re probably going to get five engineers and one designer. We went back and forth between each one of them working on whatever they want to work on, versus the whole team working on one thing. I think we’re going to go with the latter option, because we want to make some step changes to various aspects of the ecosystem, versus an iteration,” he said.
In terms of step changes, these include currency efficiency. “Security is a big one. There’s still a number of big flaws within the Bitcoin community right now. Those are the most obvious ones, but there are a number of them.”
“We don’t want any jerks,” Dorsey stated. “There’s some negativity in the community, and we want to make sure that our people are good community stewards and pay attention to not just building code, but building community. That’s what makes this magical.”
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.