A reporter at Wired magazine has been banned from Twitter after he wrote about the fact that anti-trans activist Matt Walsh had his Twitter account hacked. Walsh’s account was hacked on Tuesday and started posting offensive tweets about other popular right-wing figures like Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro.
Dell Cameron, a senior writer at Wired who covers Big Tech, wrote about the hack on Wednesday and even interviewed the person allegedly responsible for posting to Walsh’s account. That interview was apparently enough to get Cameron banned for violating Twitter’s rules on “distribution of hacked material.”
The hacker, known only as Doomed, told Cameron he was able to gain access to Walsh’s account through a technique known as SIM swapping. The technique typically involves spoofing the target’s phone number in a way that allows the hacker to intercept text messages in order to circumvent protections like two-factor authentication. But Doomed reportedly told Cameron that they had help from an “insider.”
Doomed also claimed that he gained access to Walsh’s Google and Microsoft accounts, a claim that couldn’t be independently verified, though Doomed reportedly sent Cameron a copy of Walsh’s W2 tax form. Doomed also provided Wired with messages between Walsh and conservative commentator Steven Crowder as well as Ben Shapiro.
The private documents were not published in any way at Wired, but even mentioning the existence of the hacked materials seems to have run afoul of Twitter’s policies. Curiously, when I first went looking for Twitter’s “hacked materials” page it returned an error message noting it was currently down, as you can see from the screenshot I captured below.
