Mayor Liccardo recovers Twitter account

SAN JOSE >> Mayor Sam Liccardo's Twitter account was restored Thursday evening after a hacker gained control of it for several hours, authorities said.

Shortly after resharing a congratulatory tweet from President Joe Biden just after 6 p.m. about newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, calling her “my law school classmate” and “supremely well qualified,” the account was taken over by someone identifying themselves as moderator of at least one shoe-enthusiast social media account focused on selling pictures of sneakertextured faces as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.

After taking the mayor's full name and title off the account, the hacker then began resharing recent weeks' tweets from some of those accounts.

At 6:51 p.m., a Twitter account for Liccardo's press office called out the takeover with a pair of tweets asking for viewers to take action: “We apologize, Mayor Liccardo's Twitter account has been hacked and we are working to reclaim ownership of it. Please disregard all spam content and report all suspicious tweets for spam.”

Rachel Davis, the mayor's chief communications and marketing officer, said staffers with Twitter's government relations team were working to fix things by early Friday at the latest. Although Davis said she could not remember any similar episode during her working time, she acknowledged that politicians and other public figures often fall prey to motivated trolls.

“It's something we have to be prepared for, and we're working toward a solution. We appreciate everyone's patience, and we're superthankful with Twitter doing everything to help us out,” Davis said in part Thursday night. “It seems like they've had experience with this.”

Around 10:30 p.m., the account's profile picture of the mayor, masthead and bio had been restored.