In yesterday’s massive Twitter attack, some of the highest-profile accounts on the service, including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, were hijacked to sell bitcoin scams. Notably, however, Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous Twitter user of all, was unaffected by the attack, and it could be because Twitter has implemented additional protections for his account.
In a deeply informed article about the attack, The New York Times He writes that Trump’s Twitter account has additional protection after “past incidents,” citing two anonymous sources: a senior White House official and a Twitter employee. The New York Times He did not specify what those past incidents were, but they could refer to the incident on November 2, 2017 where a rogue employee deactivated the Trump account on his last day at the company. The Trump account returned to Twitter 11 minutes later.
A day after the deactivation, Twitter said it had “put in place safeguards to prevent this from happening again.” The company did not provide further details. But The Wall Street Journal He reported at the time that Twitter had already limited the number of employees who could access Trump’s account after his inauguration. Those tools generally allow employees to suspend or disable accounts, but do not allow them to tweet from those accounts, the WSJ said.
Update: We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We may not be able to share all the details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it. https://t.co/8EfEzHvB7p
– TwitterGov (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
Motherboard They reported that people involved in Wednesday’s attack shared screenshots of a Twitter management tool apparently used for the attack. And Twitter itself has said that its own employee systems and tools were compromised. If those are also the same systems that no longer had widespread access to Trump’s account as of 2017, that could have made his account more difficult, if not impossible, to access from the administration tool used by attackers. It’s also possible that Trump’s account has tightened further after the rebel employee deactivated it in November 2017.
Twitter has not responded to a request for comment, so we cannot be sure that those safeguards are what prevented attackers from hijacking their account on Tuesday. In fact, it is unclear whether the attackers even attempted it. Either way, they didn’t go in, and that could have prevented an already very bad situation from worsening.
