Twitter Confirms CFO Account Hack

Twitter has admitted the account of its chief financial officer, Anthony Noto, has been hacked.

Noto has not had much luck with his Twitter account of late, after he used the account last November to accidentally let slip a pending acquisition of an unnamed company.

Account Hack

“His account was sending spam Tweets. We’ve locked the account down and deleted the Tweets. There’s no indication any account information was accessed,” a Twitter spokesperson told ABC News.

It seems that Noto’s account was only compromised for roughly 20 minutes on Tuesday, but during that time it reportedly tweeted nearly 300 spam messages to Noto’s 13,000 Twitter followers.

The messages reportedly included hyperlinks and messages such as “OMG when did you do this?” and “This is too funny of you,” to tempt the user into clicking.

The offending tweets have since been deleted.

Other Twitter Hacks

Twitter has suffered a number of high profile hacks in recent years.

At the weekend, the US-based Mexican restaurant chain Chipotle was forced to apologise after its Twitter account was hacked by intruders who used it to post racist and offensive messages targeting the US government and government agencies.

And late last month, the Twitter and Instagram accounts of pop starlet Taylor Swift was hacked by the infamous hacker group Lizard Squad.

Prior to that the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, was hacked and defaced with messages praising Islamic State for around 30 minutes.

In 2013, FIFA President Sepp Blatter had his Twitter account compromised by hackers sympathetic to President Bashar Assad’s government in Syria. Many other Twitter accounts have also been hacked in the past.

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