Twitter has revealed that the hackers who accessed 130 high-profile accounts – belonging to the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, former US President Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Apple, amongst others – were also able to access a number of DM inboxes.
In an official tweet, the social media platform says that up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, including 1 elected official in the Netherlands, were affected.
We believe that for up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox, including 1 elected official in the Netherlands. To date, we have no indication that any other former or current elected official had their DMs accessed.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 22, 2020
According to The Verge, hackers were able to initiate a password reset, login and tweet from 45 of the targetted accounts.
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’. And it believes this was a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools.
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.
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