Twitter Withdraws SMS Tweet Feature for Now

You must have read in the newspapers lately that the Twitter account of the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was hacked. The hackers posted some vulgar material through the official Twitter account of the Twitter boss, much to the embarrassment of the individual and the company.

According to the New York Times, what happened was that the hackers took control of Jack Dorsey’s phone number through a common hacking method known as SIM swapping. The method is a popular hacking tool, and frankly speaking, individuals who are targeted have little to do by means of avoiding being hacked.

In this method, hackers call mobile service providers and pretend to be a victim who has lost a SIM. They register a request for SIM swapping, where the functions and number of the actual victim’s SIM card are transferred to a SIM that the hacker is holding. It happened with Jack Dorsey, a man who’s at the peak of technological innovation. So it can happen to you!

Twitter also had this feature of tweeting through SMS. With this event happening, they have temporarily withdrawn this feature. As of now, you cannot tweet through text messages anymore. This feature was long there, since the days when smartphones were not so easily available. To enable tweets to be uploaded as and when the users intended, even if they didn’t have access to a computer, Twitter helped to tweet through SMS.

Now that SIM swapping and misuse of this feature is rampant, the feature goes into a cold storage. You should know here that Twitter realizes that there is still a market for this feature. So they are not dismissing it outright. After a while, when they have worked out a better security arrangement to stop misuse through SMS tweets, they may activate this feature for selected markets only.