Tag Archives: Twitter

The guy who hacked Twitter: “Kirk” and the human factor

It was a 17-year-old hacker who managed to persuade some Twitter employees that he was a collaborator of the technology department who needed the credentials to log into the customer support portal. Resident of Tampa, Florida, Graham Ivan Clark – known by the pseudonym Kirk – is defined by investigators as a teenager out of the ordinary. The story Having obtained the passwords, “Kirk” was able to enter the Twitter computer system. The intrusion involved access to hundreds of VIP profiles including Barack Obama and Bill Gates, but also Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Wiz Khalifa, Floyd Mayweather, Elon Musk, and Kanye West. Kirk’s goal was to publish fake […]

Jul 23

Twitter attack: the three lessons to learn

The recent cyber-attack that hit Twitter has created a lot of media sensation, especially because it is the first time that one of the great global social media platforms has been compromised in such a vast and blatant way. Beyond the economic and image damage produced by the attack, this event must push us to make some broader considerations, starting from the implications for cybersecurity and privacy, up to the role that certain social networks have now assumed in the sphere of social and political life. The dynamics of the attack On July 15, 2020, between 8:00 PM and 10:00 PM UTC, several Twitter accounts of celebrities, each with millions […]