A Democratic candidate for a state Senate seat in Arizona says his Twitter account was hacked before it tweeted out several pornographic messages on Monday.
Steven Weichert, who is running for Arizona’s 17th district in the 2018 midterm election, apologized for the tweets, calling them “rather lewd” and said his account was hacked. At the end of the tweet, Weichert made a quip about current national politics: “Darn those Russians!”
My apologies to anyone who may have received a rather lewd tweet from me this morning. My account was hacked. (Darn those Russians!)
— Steve Weichert (@SteveWeichert) August 7, 2017
In an interview with a local television station, Weichert called the incident “disconcerting” because he uses Twitter as a “lifeline” to people he’s hoping to represent.
“All of a sudden I just felt my phone blowing up,” Weichert told ABC15, adding that he was taking his children to school as the incident began. “Somebody sent me a text saying ‘What are you doing?’ and I’m like ‘What? What are you talking about?’”
Weichert said he began changing his passwords and tried to delete the tweets.
“It was kind of like that scene from I Love Lucy with the conveyor belt and the chocolate,” he told the television station. “Well, that’s kind of how this was with pornographic images.”
Weichert said he plans on filing a police report about the hack.
The moral of this story is: Use two-step verification for your social media profiles. If not, you just might be looking at a “conveyor belt” of porn being tweeted from your account.