Many high profile twitter accounts including that of former US President Barack Obama, Tesla’s Elon Musk, investor Warren Buffet, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and even official companies’ handles such as Apple and Uber were hacked. This hacker breached Twitter’s ‘admin tools’ which usually, twitter employees have access to. It looks like one of their accounts has been hacked into to get access to such tools.
All of them are intended to scam followers to pay exorbitant amounts through bitcoin and get back double the amount. Apparently, the hacker also made arrangements such that the actual account owners don’t get access to their tweets by changing the associated email addresses. Twitter Support claims this is an act of ‘coordinated social engineering attack’.
All activities on Twitter seem to have resumed to normal for now. Twitter has investigated the incident, and found this attack to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who “successfully targeted some of our employees” with access to internal systems and tools. The company further added, “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.”
Here is the entire chain of incidents from Twitter and the company’s action on it:
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
Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk. Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we do.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates to come as our investigation continues.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Meanwhile, markets haven’t been gentle to the tweeting bird, with Twitter shares falling over 3% in after market trading.
This is not the first time that Twitter has reported a massive hack. In March 2017, the accounts of Amnesty International, the French economics ministry and the BBC’s North America service were broken into by hackers believed to have been loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
