Twitter suffered a serious security lapse last week which saw some popular verified accounts get hacked in a widespread cryptocurrency scam. This was a huge embarrassment for the company and now they are giving more details about the attack
Twitter revealed that 130 accounts in total were targeted by the attackers. 45 of those accounts had tweets sent by the attackers, 36 accounts had their DMs accessed and 8 accounts had their Twitter Data downloaded. Of those accounts that had their Twitter Data downloaded, none of those is verified.
This is an update to the initial report Twitter shared to the public about the attack. On 18th July, they said they believe the attackers targeted certain Twitter employees through manipulation to divulge confidential information. They used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal system and bypassed their two-factor protections. This led to the attack that caused 130 accounts to the compromised.
That attack was so bad, Twitter decided to prevent every verified account from tweeting. The hack managed to fool some people to send their Bitcoins to the hackers and at some point, the hackers managed to scam over $100,000 from people in a very short period. This situation would have been even worse if Coinbase hadn’t halted more than $280,000 in bitcoin transactions during the hack. The hack even caught the eye of the FBI and launched a probe to the attack.
