Notices by Snopes (snopes@infosec.exchange)

2/8
I immediately reset the password with the “forgot password” link but we were still locked out as I couldn’t login without the two-factor authenticator. Thankfully no one ever posted as Snopes so I’m guessing that resetting the password also kicked out the hacker as they didn’t get a chance to change the email and phone number.

From Snopes CEO

1/8
On Jan 31st, one of our employees said they couldn’t log in to our Snopes X account. I checked our site email and noticed that a minute earlier, we received an email from X saying someone new logged into our Snopes account. I didn’t recognize the location and then I saw another email that came directly after saying “X two-factor authentication is good to go”.

That’s when panic set in.

5/8
I tried adding dozens of people on LinkedIn that say they work at X. Four of them accepted the invite and zero of them responded when I asked for help of who I can talk to at the company. I then tried signing up for linkedIn Premium to send more messages to X’ employees but again no responses from anyone.

4/8
I tried paying for the $1,000/month X Verified Org plan (even though Snopes already had this for free) to get Priority Support. After submitting payment I clicked “Contact us” and there was a special email to contact. Finally, a way to talk to someone at X! Nope. I received an auto responder a couple minutes later saying “This email address has ben deprecated” (with the “been” typo). It then directed me back to the help center I’ve been trying to get help from for 6 weeks.

3/8
I reached out to X help support many times over the last 6 weeks with no response. I tried the form saying we were hacked and the form saying we were having trouble with our two-factor authentication. No help.

8/8
90 minutes later he gave us confirmation from support saying our account was hacked and they are resetting it for us. A few minutes later we had our Snopes account back!

In summary, always use two-factor authentication. We left it off because we had multiple employees logging into the account, but clearly it’s not worth the risk.

X has the worst customer support I’ve ever seen, even if you pay $1,000/month you can’t email them.

Grok did help save the day by pointing us to John Stoll.

7/8
Finally, I went back to Grok and asked if there were any other well known employees at X. Of course, it listed Elon and Linda, but they both have PM’s disabled. And then it listed John Stoll, X’s new head of news. I thought, of anyone, the head of news would be the most likely to help us, so this felt promising. I sent him a PM on X from my personal account and in less than 2 minutes he responded and said he would take care of it.

6/8
I asked Grok what we should do but we already tried all of the suggestions.

Our Snopes account was hacked on X (formerly twitter) and we got locked out for six weeks. We finally just got it back!

See the full story in the comments below for what we had to do to get someone/anyone at X to help us.

Today's newsletter is getting a lot of engagement from Musk's claim that '150-year-olds' are collecting Social Security payments. Here is what we found:

https://mail.snopes.com/p/social-security-payments-texas-girl-chris-stapleton

Our new President has been keeping us busy

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/31/hamas-condoms-bombs-trump/

It appears our Snopes' X/Twitter account has just been hacked.

One of our staff was logged-in at the time and all of sudden got booted. We checked our email and noticed 3 just came in from X (first saying a new device logged-in then an email saying an authenticator app was added followed by an email saying our password was changed).

I immediately reset the password as our email was still tied to the account but we still couldn't login because it said we need to use the authenticator app which we didn't add. I also immediately submitted a request to X support saying our account may have been hacked.

Anything else we should do? This happened about 20 minutes ago. So far there are no weird posts on our account [x.com/snopes]. I'm hoping the hacker got booted when I submitted the password reset and request to X support immediately after being booted.

We verified our domain on our profile as a few users suggested we do.

Did Snopes really create an account here?

Fact Check: True

Source: https://www.snopes.com/faqs/#faqs_question-285676