Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday the company “fell behind” in some of its security restrictions leading to hacking of sine prominent users, some of which are former president Barack Obama and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk on the social media site last week.
The CEO said while announcing the company’s second-quarter earnings :
“Last week was a really tough week for all of us at Twitter, and we feel terrible about the security incident that negatively affected the people we serve and their trust in us,” Dorsey said in prepared remarks on an earnings call. “Security doesn’t have an end point. It’s a constant iteration to stay steps ahead of adversaries. We fell behind, both in our protections against social engineering of our employees and restrictions on our internal tools.”
He also said that the users have increase but the advertising revenue has deceased during the pandemic.
The company added that hackers accessed 130 accounts on the site, and sent tweets — many of them advertising a bitcoin scam — from 45 of those accounts. Hackers were able to view the private messages of 36 accounts, including the account of one elected official in the Netherlands. The company said it doesn’t believe any other former or current elected officials’ direct messages were accessed during the hacking process.
Twitter is also looking into other ways to bring in money, including a possible subscription model, Jack said. He offered few details on what consumers would potentially pay for, saying only that the company was in “the very, very early phases of exploring.”
It was reported that he said: “We have a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter”.
Twitter reported it now has 186 million daily users, up 34 percent from the second quarter last year. But revenue fell 19 percent to $683 million during the quarter, this is due to the pull back during the pandemic and some brands paused social media advertising during the Black Lives Matter protest.