Moscow: Twitter on Saturday shared their investigation report on the attack on accounts of high-profile figures. It said that hackers infiltrated into the company’s internal systems using several employees’ credentials.
“The attackers successfully manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems, including getting through our two-factor protections. As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts. For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send Tweets,” Twitter said in its blog post.
“We are continuing our forensic review of all of the accounts to confirm all actions that may have been taken. In addition, we believe they may have attempted to sell some of the usernames,” the micro-blogging site added.
“For up to eight of the Twitter accounts involved, the attackers took the additional step of downloading the account’s information through our “Your Twitter Data” tool. This is a tool that is meant to provide an account owner with a summary of their Twitter account details and activity. We are reaching out directly to any account owner where we know this to be true. None of the eight were verified accounts,” said Twitter.
We’re sharing a blog post that collects the latest on our investigation. It reiterates what we’ve already shared here, and includes a few new findings. https://t.co/8mN4NYWZ3O
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 18, 2020
Meanwhile, Government of India has issued notice to the company to seek details of the cyber-attack.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has asked Twitter to furnish full details of the global hack, the number of Indian users affected and data impacted, sources told news agency PTI on Saturday.
Accounts of prominent personalities along with the likes of former US President Barack Obama, billionaire entrepreneurs Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, rapper Kanye West and US Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden, were hacked by Bitcoin scammers, who circulated spam messages from their profiles asking people to donate money to a Bitcoin wallet address embedded as a link.
