07/16/2020

Twitter CEO Promises Transparency in First Interview Post-data Hack

When mistakes happen, leaders must own them

On July 15, 2020, a massive Twitter hack saw high profile accounts, from former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden to Elon Musk and the official Apple account, hijacked to post messages promoting a cryptocurrency scam. In his first interview since the attack, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged to keep one principle in mind throughout the company’s investigation: transparency.

“We’re going to be really transparent—own anything that we made mistakes around and what we find,” Dorsey said Thursday in a video interview with Fast Company editor-in-chief Stephanie Mehta at Procter & Gamble’s Signal conference. The wide-ranging conversation also included the company’s approach to handling misinformation, features designed to let users take more control over who they interact with on the site, and the platform’s use in the Black Lives Matter protests.

So far, Dorsey and other company officials have said the company was a victim of “social engineering,” a security term that generally refers to hackers scamming people into giving them access they shouldn’t have. Motherboard reported that a hacker allegedly involved in the attack claimed that a Twitter insider was paid for assistance, while TechCrunch reported that a hacker gained access to an internal admin tool. A Twitter spokesperson said in an email to Fast Company that the company didn’t have any updates on the investigation beyond what’s been shared via a company tweet thread.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.