Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey has account hacked

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The co-founder and chief executive of Twitter had his own account on the service briefly taken over by hackers. It appears to be the same group that went after YouTubers. The profile of jack Dorsey has more than four million followers, tweeted out a flurry of highly offensive and racist remarks for about 15 minutes.

Today’s hack appears to be from the same group that attacked a number of YouTube celebrities last week on Twitter. Twitter said in a statement, its own systems were not compromised, instead blaming an unnamed mobile operator and the phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight by the mobile provider," Twitter said in a statement.

"This allowed an unauthorised person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved." A source at the company confirmed to the BBC that the hackers had used a technique known as "simswapping" (or "simjacking") in order to control Mr Dorsey's account.

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We're aware that @jack was compromised and investigating what happened.

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Nearly, an hour and a half after the hack, Twitter tweeted that “the account is now secure, and there is no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised.”

This is a technique whereby an existing phone number - in this case one associated with Mr Dorsey's account - is transferred to a new SIM card, usually after attackers trick or bribe customer support staff at a mobile provider. By taking control of the number, the attackers were able to post tweets via text message directly on to Mr Dorsey's Twitter account.

While nowadays the overwhelming number of users use mobile apps to tweet, Twitter's early days were built around texting in updates - hence the character limit - and Twitter has kept this method, in part because of its use in developing countries with high data costs.

While the security lapse appears to have happened outside the company, it is still an embarrassing incident for Twitter, a service which hosts the world's most powerful leaders.