How Activist DeRay Mckesson's Twitter Account Was Hacked

Racial justice activist DeRay Mckesson became the most recent victim of a high-profile Twitter account hack. Mckesson this week started to endorse for Donald Trump and posted a self-defamatory tweet. Later he announced that his account was hacked. What's interesting about this hack was that Mckesson had two-factor authentication enabled on "all" of his accounts. Hackers apparently resorted to a much-sophisticated attack: Hacker or hackers were able to take over by convincing Verizon to reset his SIM. With the SIM reset, the person responsible was able to receive text messages intended for Mckesson and therefore bypass the two-factor authentication the activist used to keep his account secure.

Comments

Social engineering is king

[Anonymous Coward]

Just goes to show that no matter how secure your system is there is still a human who needs to be able to access it at the end of the day, and that human is vulnerable to being tricked. This does call into question exactly how lax Verizon's customer service is at verifying that they are indeed talking to the account holder. Id be interested in hearing what Verizon has to say about this incident, whether or not proper procedure was followed or not.