Published 01:59 IST, July 19th 2020
Twitter says hackers "manipulated" some of its employees in bitcoin scam
"We know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts,"Twitter said in a statement on its official site.
- Tech
- 3 min read
In a statement about the security breach on Twitter that compromised high-profile accounts including that of democratic presential runner Joe Biden, former US president Barack Obama, and tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Twitter says that hackers "manipulated" some of its employees to gain access.
Bitcoin spam messages were tweeted out of the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Bill Gates, and many other VIPs with hackers funnelled over $100,000 worth of the virtual currency, according to Blockchain.com, a site that monitors crypto transactions.
"We know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts," Twitter said in a statement on its official site.
“We believe attackers targeted certain Twitter employees through a social engineering scheme,” it added, saying, that the hackers manipulated employees into using their credentials and decoding two-factor protections to access Twitter’s internal systems.
"We’re embarrassed": Twitter
As per a forensic review done by Twitter, the company found that the usernames were “sold” to the spammers and attackers initiated a password reset, then logged in to the accounts to send Tweets. Further, the attackers took an additional step of downloading the account’s information through our “Your Twitter Data” tool, Twitter revealed in the statement.
In a drastic step to regaining control of the accounts, Twitter locked down the compromised accounts immediately. Additionally, the incident response team “secured and revoked access” to internal systems to shut out the attackers in remediation steps.
We’re embarrassed, we’re disappointed, and more than anything, we’re sorry. We know that we must work to regain your trust, and we will support all efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice, Twitter said.
Donald Trump’s account remains untargeted
While Twitter managed to take down the fraudulent tweets, Twitter regretted the statement that the spammers were able to access the personal information of the verified accounts, including email addresses and phone numbers. However, it said that the authorities were working to identify the perpetrators.
According to a report, the attack was drafted by a group of young friends with no previously known links to state or organized crime, who were headed by an individual who goes by an alias ‘Kirk’. The group had previously taken control of lesser-known accounts, however, until recently, middleman ‘Kirk’ made the high profile accounts a target.
President of the US Donald Trump’s account, however, remains untargeted. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told a press conference that the US president’s account “was secure and not jeopardised during these attacks.”
Updated 01:59 IST, July 19th 2020