SEC account hack renews spotlight on X’s security concerns

(Reuters) — The hack of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s official X account on Tuesday renewed concerns about the social media platform’s security since its takeover by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022.

The hackers posted false news about a widely anticipated announcement the SEC was expected to make about bitcoin, leading the cryptocurrency’s price to spike and alarming observers. The false post on @SECGov said the securities regulator had approved exchange-traded funds to hold bitcoin. The SEC deleted the post about 30 minutes after it appeared.

X confirmed later Tuesday, following a preliminary investigation, that the SEC’s account was compromised because an unidentified individual gained control over a phone number associated with the account through a third party.

The social media platform also said in a post that the SEC did not have two-factor authentication enabled at the time the account was compromised.

While X said the compromise was not because of a breach of the platform’s systems, security analysts called the incident disquieting.

“Something like that, where you can take over the SEC account and potentially affect the value of bitcoin in the market — there’s massive opportunity for disinformation,” said Austin Berglas, a former cybersecurity official in the FBI’s New York office and a senior executive at security company BlueVoyant.

Accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, can be hijacked by stealing passwords or tricking targets into giving up their login credentials, just like on any other social media platform. 

Accounts can also be taken over by breaching X’s security, as happened in 2020, when a teenager masterminded a break-in of Twitter’s internal computer network and seized control of dozens of high-profile accounts, including those of former President Barack Obama and Mr. Musk, well before he bought Twitter.

An SEC spokesperson said Tuesday that the “unauthorized access” of its account by an “unknown party” had been revoked and the agency was working with law enforcement and others in the government to investigate the matter.