Communications · Unknown
On May 6, 2016, the Twitter account of Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda, founder of Runrun.es, was hijacked by unauthorized individuals through a SIM swap attack: They requested a copy of the journalist’s SIM card from the carrier Movistar using a forged letter to “replace” it, thereby bypassing Twitter’s two-step verification by receiving the code on the cloned number. The attackers deleted his tweets, posted messages falsely linking him to the U.S. government and the CIA (for example, “I confess and declare myself a CIA agent”), exposed private messages, and changed his username from @nelsonbocaranda to @nelsonbocarnda. The journalist, who had more than 2 million followers, regained access to his account about 30 hours later. This was the second time his account had been hacked, following a previous incident in July 2014.