San Francisco (AFP)

The Twitter account of Jack Dorsey, boss and founder of the bird social network, was briefly hacked on Friday and displayed insulting or racist messages. A very hugging episode for Twitter.

"We are aware that @jack has been hacked and we are investigating what happened," the company tweeted.

Racist insults against blacks and tweets apologizing for Adolf Hitler began to appear shortly before 20:00 GMT. The messages were quickly removed in about fifteen minutes, but long enough for the news to go around Twitter and the subject of multiple comments often mocking.

The suspicious tweets included several hashtags that already appeared in other hacking acts: #chucklingsquad and #ChucklingHela.

In particular, the London police account was hacked in July and the same shards appeared on the hijacked tweets.

The police then attributed the attack to a young man, adolescent or twenties, known as Cal or @ Cal086 who would live in the United States.

The hashtag also reappeared during an attack last week against Etika's Twitter account (Daniel Desmond Amofah). This "hack" had all the more shocked that the account had been hacked after the death of young Youtubeur, found dead on June 25.

@jack is the first address in Twitter's history. March 21, 2006 Jack Dorsey had sent the first tweet: "just setting up my twttr".

- embarrassing incident -

Twitter is the subject of many critics on all sides about the slow response and eliminate tweets deemed racist or inciting violence.

His lack of reactivity - like Facebook - at the time of the large-scale disinformation operation undertaken by Russian agencies to favor the election of Donald Trump in 2016, was also criticized.

The social network has increased efforts to eliminate tweets which it believes violate the users' charter but also to erase, sometimes before they are online, accounts sowing misinformation.

So on August 19, Twitter revealed that Chinese authorities have used nearly a thousand accounts to discredit and divide pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Twitter suspended 986 accounts that "are coordinated as part of a Chinese-backed operation to" undermine the legitimacy and political positions "of the protesters, the network said.

Twitter had even alerted its rival Facebook of the Chinese regime's attempts, leading Mark Zuckerberg's social network to also crack down on him.

But not everyone is convinced. "The fact that @jack's account was hacked does not inspire confidence in the Twitter platform, which is just before a federal election in Canada," tweeted Michelle Rempel Garner, a Canadian Conservative woman.

Shortly after the attack, many cybersecurity experts reminded users that they must use dual factor authentication to log in to their account securely.

This dual authentication, besides the classic password can also include the registration of a single number of digits provided by an application.

Without being perfect this protection makes the job of hackers much more difficult, but users are often reluctant to use it because it involves going through an extra step before accessing the network.

© 2019 AFP