Twitter fell victim to a major hack that saw 130 high-profile accounts – belonging to the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, former US President Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Apple, amongst others – targetted, although it’s reported that no passwords were stolen.
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’, according to The Verge.
Twitter has since confirmed that they are working on the issue and have “locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely”.
The social media platform has said that it has detected what it believes to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools.
Hackers used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. Twitter says that there’s no evidence that attackers accessed passwords and they don’t believe resetting your password is necessary.
US officials have called on Twitter to share more information.
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.
The BBC reports that non-business Twitter users will not be affected.
