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After Twitter account hacks, how to identify a hijacked tweet

Sinan Aral, the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science, MIT and “The Hype Machine” author joins Yahoo Finance to talk about the Twitter account hack and what it means for companies and social media users.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: We want to get back to Twitter now and what's going on there. We just heard a few moments ago that the FBI is now going to be investigating that hack into Twitter. That's according to "Reuters." We want to bring in Sinan Aral. He is the David Austen professor of management, marketing, IT, and data science at MIT. He's also the author of "The Hype Machine," and he's a frequent guest on the show.

Sinan, I think one of the primary questions coming out of this hack yesterday, which, you know, if you didn't send your money and get scammed, is something that just initially seemed amusing. But there are implications, particularly for the election and for disinformation. What are your takeaways from what happened yesterday? Oh, I think you need to unmute yourself, Sinan, sorry.

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SINAN ARAL: Based on Jack Dorsey's tweet, you know, I think that they took this very seriously. He called it a very troubling day or a very difficult day for Twitter. I think it raises a number of concerns. The first is that this is what we call a behavioral hack. "Motherboard" and others are reporting that the hackers got access to internal tools that essentially controlled the users' accounts.

And you can do this through phishing, for instance, by getting passwords with emails that phish for those passwords. Or in this case, it might be that the hijackers of the accounts paid employees of Twitter to give them access to these internal tools. It's not clear yet. Twitter is still making an investigation. The FBI is making an investigation.

But one of the consequences was that Twitter stopped-- disallowed these users from tweeting at all or resetting their passwords during this period of time. So it essentially froze all of these very high profile accounts until they could figure out what was going on. This has tremendous implications, because it shows that these types of social media companies may not be secure, which tweets should we be trusting, which tweets should we be not.

When Bill Gates plugs Bitcoin, it might be obvious. But when it's less obvious, how are we going to be aware that something has been a hijacked account or a hijacked tweet? I think there's a lot of questions that need to be answered here.

DAN HOWLEY: Sinan, this is Dan Howley. You know, we look at this and we say, you know, Twitter saying that it was a kind of social engineering attack. We look at something like a TikTok recently where that's got everybody kind of wringing their hands. But then we have this huge hack from Twitter. I guess, is it a false equivalency to say that, you know, all social networks-- these two in particular-- are at risk of something along the lines of our data being abused?

And I guess going forward when you look at Twitter, what does this mean for the company itself? You know, I was saying before, markets rise and fall on the president's tweets. What could happen here if these people got a hold of his account and said something, as you said, not necessarily so outlandish, but more subtle?

SINAN ARAL: Yeah, I mean, I think that in answer to your first question. I think that there's always a danger and a need for vigilance around hacking and security. I think that's becoming more and more obvious every day, that no platform or company is immune from this kind of hacking. In my book, "The Hype Machine," I open one of the chapters with the crash hack, where Syrian hackers hacked the "AP" Twitter handle and said that Barack Obama had been injured in an explosion in the White House, and $140 billion in equity value was wiped out in a matter of minutes. And that's just one of the stories that I tell in the book.

This is a very real threat. There needs to be a very serious concentration on security. And, yes, during the election where there is a moment in time, a window of weeks or months where people's attention is on who they should vote for, subtle misinformation that is produced through hacking could have important effects on our democracy. And vigilance is very important in this moment.

JARED BLIKRE: Hi, Sinan, Jared Blikre here. I just want to ask you about another event that happened earlier this morning in the EU. And that was a surprise ruling that data for a lot of these tech companies will have to be housed in Europe. So that kind of takes away a lot of the juice, if you will, from a lot of American tech companies. Are we entering a stage now where we're going to see tech siloed across the world? And how does this affect the growth of some of these larger tech stocks? And what's the implications for data sharing around the world?

SINAN ARAL: Well, Jared, great question-- I think the best way I can answer it is that we are at a crossroads where the next 18 to 24 months, in terms of how these firms are regulated in the United States and elsewhere, is going to determine the answer to your question with regards to stocks and so on. As we know, we've got a big antitrust hearing coming at the end of July here for the major tech companies in the House.

As well, we know that Europe is, as you say, changing the way it does a few things with regard to data. We've got the California privacy legislation leading the way in the states-- the United States-- but probably going to see federal privacy legislation over the next two years or so, or three years. And we're going to see lots of hearings to talk about this kind of stuff.

So the best way that I can describe it is we have three regimes. We have the Chinese regime, which is essentially state-controlled information where all of that information from those companies can be used by the state. We have the far other end in Europe, where privacy-- the GDPR holds privacy paramount. And then we have the US in between that is trying to decide what it's going to do with regard to regulation-- anti-trust, privacy, and other things. And the answer to your question is, a lot will be seen with regard to these stocks and the outcomes in the next 18 to 24 months. We're at a crossroads.

JULIE HYMAN: Sinan, thank you very much. It's good to get your perspective, as always. Sinan Aral is David Austen professor of management, marketing, IT, and data science at MIT and author of "The Hype Machine."