DeRay McKesson Twitter Hack Confirmed in Phone Call to 'Mic'

DeRay McKesson, prominent civil rights activist and member of the Black Lives Matter movement, tweeted out his support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Friday. Then he tweeted that he was "not actually black".

The tweets weren't written by McKesson himself. "I was super hacked," he said in a phone call to Mic, adding that he had been working all morning to secure his accounts.

He later took to social media himself to set the record straight, tweeting that a hacker had successfully accessed his Verizon account directly by impersonating him in a call to the service provider.

In a separate tweet, he denied that he was endorsing Trump for president, calling him "a racist & a bigot, unfit to lead".

Though his Twitter account was not the source of the hack, McKesson is still among the ranks of the 32 million Twitter users currently at risk after a hacker put their passwords and login information up for grabs on the Dark Web.

He's also not the first high-profile user of the social media giant to be targeted. On June 6, Kylie Jenner's account unleashed slew of vile statements, which the reality star confirmed in a Snapchat video had not come from her.

"Mmm, so my Twitter was hacked," she said, "and I don't really care. I'm just letting them have fun."

McKesson praised Twitter for its fast response to his hacked account, saying that they had swiftly removed the hacked tweets at his request with no issue. 

The company confirmed in a statement on Thursday that their security systems had not been breached. The more likely scenario, the company's trust and information security officer Michael Coates said, was that millions of users had become infected by malicious software. 

"We have investigated reports of Twitter usernames/passwords on the dark web, and we're confident that our systems have not been breached," he tweeted.

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