Twitter announced yesterday it would temporarily disable users’ ability to tweet via SMS.
The announcement was made via the official Twitter Support account in a series of tweets, citing “vulnerabilities” that need to be addressed.
The company said, “We’re taking this step because of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers and our reliance on having a linked phone number for two-factor authentication (we’re working on improving this).”
Twitter also added, “We’ll reactivate this in markets that depend on SMS for reliable communication soon while we work on our longer-term strategy for this feature.”
The latest measure follows another high profile Twitter hack in less than a week. It happened to actress Chloe Grace Moretz. On Friday, CEO, Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked.
According to Digital Trends, the hackers tweeted out the hashtag #chucklingSquad — the name of the hacking collective — during both incidents, as well as racial slurs, “intel” about a bomb threat at Twitter’s headquarters, phone numbers, and even what they claimed to be Dorsey’s social security number. The tweets have since been deleted.
The hackers were able to access Moretz’s and Dorsey’s accounts through SIM swapping. With this method, hackers convince cell phone carriers to assign a phone number to a new phone that is in the hands of the hackers. Reports about the hacks say that both instances of hacked tweets were sent using the MMS company, Cloudhopper, by using texts to tweet. Twitter acquired the company back in 2010.
Twitter’s communications account confirmed the SIM swapping method in a series of tweets on August 30.
Twitter’s policies currently allow users to add their phone number to an existing Twitter account to send and receive tweets as texts. According to the policies, only the account most recently linked to the phone number is allowed to perform SMS commands, meaning if you have more than one Twitter account, you could previously only text your tweets to the newest one.
The SMS text feature is commonly used for more rural areas that don’t get clear Wi-Fi service.
When asked how long the SMS feature will be disabled, Twitter said, “that there is no estimate to share at this time.”
