Twitter Finance Chief's Account Briefly Seized by Spammer

A lot of Twitter users find the nuances of the social network difficult to navigate, such as the difference between private direct messages and public replies and what level of access that third-party apps get to your Twitter account if you use it to sign in or post content from them.

Even Twitter's chief financial officer, Anthony Noto, struggles with it.

A third party that has not been identified briefly got access to Noto's Twitter account on Tuesday morning, sending out spam links as public replies to other users. Although it is still unclear what happened, Twitter said that it had found no evidence that his account was hacked.

Rather, Noto appears to have authorized an outside app or website to post tweets on his behalf, and that app began sending the spam, which purported to send users to a sports score site. (Other Twitter users also appear to have fallen victim to the attack, with their accounts sending tweets directing people to the same spam site.)

A Twitter spokesman, Jim Prosser, confirmed the incident, which was first reported by Bloomberg, and said the company was investigating.

"His account was sending spam Tweets. We've locked the account down and deleted the tweets," Prosser said in an email. "There's no indication any account information was accessed."

Like other social networks such as Facebook and Google Plus, Twitter has pushed hard to get other companies to plug in to its service. Media sites, for example, commonly feature a button that allows visitors to share a link to an article or video to their followers. Some apps allow you to sign in to them using your Twitter ID. Typically, those apps get only limited access to the Twitter user's account, which is disclosed when the person first gives permission to use the account.

However, Twitter users can also grant nearly full access to social media management services such as HootSuite, which offers sophisticated tools for posting, reading and analyzing tweets.

Prosser declined to say whether Noto had deliberately allowed a third-party service to access his account.

This is not the first time Noto has publicly struggled with Twitter's features. In November, he posted a message about a potential acquisition that was apparently intended to be sent privately. A few days later, he posted another cryptic tweet that also appeared to be intended as a private message.

As one of the top officers of Twitter, Noto is an unusual position to influence the company's stock with his tweets. A former linebacker at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a former chief financial officer of the National Football League, he usually tweets about sports.

© 2015 New York Times News Service