By Zeba Siddiqui and Raphael Satter
SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) - The hack of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's official account on X 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 roughly 30 minutes after it appeared.
It wasn't immediately clear how a hacker had gained access to the SEC's official account, but 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 at the FBI's New York office and a senior executive at the security firm 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 Musk, well before he bought Twitter.
An SEC spokesperson on Tuesday said the "unauthorized access" of its account by an "unknown party" had been revoked and the agency was working with law enforcement and others in the government to investigate the matter.
X didn't respond to a series of questions for this story, but in a statement issued earlier Tuesday, the company said that the SEC's account was secure and the company was investigating the "root cause" of the account compromise.
Even before it was acquired by Musk and changed its name to X, however, Twitter was the subject of persistent security problems.
The 2019 arrest of a Saudi agent who had secretly combed the site's backend
for personal information about the kingdom's dissidents
raised concerns about Twitter's internal safeguards. The mass hijacking of top accounts the following year by the Florida teen heightened the concerns, with New York state's Department of Financial Services