Twitter Claims 130 Accounts Were Compromised But Fails To Answers If Attackers Accessed DMs
On Thursday, Twitter has finally disclosed that attackers targeted nearly 130 accounts. This week’s cyber-attack incident led to a full blow crypto-currency scam by misusing profiles of many prominent personalities and organizations. Later the company confirmed that hackers launched a “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
Reportedly, attacked gained access to the internal systems of the company which led to the hijack. They targeted some of the top voices on the platform including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, former U.S. President Barack Obama, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, and billionaire Elon Musk. The attackers used their accounts to solicit digital currency.
On Thursday, the company said in a series of tweets, “We have no evidence that attackers accessed passwords. Currently, we don’t believe resetting your password is necessary.”
“Out of an abundance of caution, and as part of our incident response yesterday to protect people’s security, we took the step to lock any accounts that had attempted to change the account’s password during the past 30 days,” it said. “As part of the additional security measures we’ve taken, you may not have been able to reset your password. Other than the accounts that are still locked, people should be able to reset their password now.”
Several other high-profile accounts that were hacked included Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, rapper Kanye West, investor Warren Buffett, and the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple.
Also Read: Twitter Accounts Of Many Influencers Hacked In Crypto Scam
San Francisco’s FBI division is leading inquiry with many Washington lawmakers alongside calling for an accounting of how it happened. The agency said that the attackers committed cryptocurrency fraud. They also reported that the publicly available blockchain records show that the scammers received cryptocurrency worth more than $100,000.
Twitter added in its statement “We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can.”