Twitter fell victim to a major hack that saw verified high-profile accounts – belonging to the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, former US President Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Apple, amongst others – taken over.
Hackers used these accounts to promote a bitcoin scam where users were urged to send $1000 worth of the crypto to a specific account that was listed in the tweet, they would then receive double their payment in return.
The unprecedented attack is ‘one of the most widespread and confounding hacks the platform has ever seen’, according to The Verge.
Twitter has since confirmed that they are working on the issue and have “locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely”.
The social media platform has also provided some insight into the root of the attack – saying that its internal systems were hacked which leads it to believe that its employees were compromised.
“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” reads an official tweet from Twitter. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf.”
We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey says that there are teams who are currently working hard to make this right.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Twitter Addresses Potentially Harmful Data Breach
Just last month, Twitter confirmed that sensitive data regarding their business customers may have been compromised. The company says that some clients billing information was unknowingly stored in their browser’s cache, making it ‘possible’ for others to access.
The data in question includes personal email addresses, phone numbers as well as the last four digits of credit card numbers.
The BBC reports that non-business Twitter users will not be affected.
