Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) urged SEC Inspector General Deborah Jeffrey in a letter Thursday to open a probe into the “SEC’s apparent failure to follow cybersecurity best practices.”
The letter was first reported Friday by Axios.
Wyden serves as the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, while Lummis is a member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the SEC.
The SEC revealed Tuesday that its X account had been hacked, after it appeared to announce the approval of several bitcoin investment funds. The false announcement came as the cryptocurrency industry eagerly awaited the agency’s decision on nearly a dozen such funds.
The original post was online for about 30 minutes before it was deleted and replaced with the SEC’s disavowal. However, the confusion created by the hack caused the price of bitcoin to spike to nearly $48,000, before tumbling to less than $46,000 on Tuesday evening.
“The @SECGov X account was compromised, and an unauthorized post was posted,” the agency wrote in a Tuesday afternoon post. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.”
X said Wednesday that a “preliminary investigation” of the breach found that it was “not due to any breach of X’s systems, but rather due to an unidentified individual obtaining control over a phone number” associated with the SEC’s account.
The social media company also said the agency did not have two-factor authentication enabled at the time of the hack.
“Given the obvious potential for market manipulation, if X’s statement is correct, the SEC’s social media accounts should have been secured using industry best practices,” Wyden and Lummis said in Thursday’s letter.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
