New Delhi, July 17 (IANS) After facing the worst cyber attack ever, Twitter on Friday said nearly 130 accounts were affected by the mega cryptocurrency scam and it was working with the impacted account owners to control the situation.
Twitter acknowledged hackers took control of its internal system and tools after hijacking the accounts of several top-notch public figures.
“Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident.
“For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts,” Twitter Support tweeted.
The company said that it was assessing “whether non-public data related to these accounts was compromised, and will provide updates if we determine that occurred”.
For all accounts, downloading ‘Your Twitter Data’ has been disabled pending investigation.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we took the step to lock any accounts that had attempted to change the account’s password during the past 30 days,” said Twitter.
As part of the additional security measures Twitter took, “you may not have been able to reset your password. Other than the accounts that are still locked, people should be able to reset their password now”.
The cybercriminals sent bogus tweets from high-profile people like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg and tech billionaires and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, Apple and Uber, offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to a bitcoin address.
Celebrities like Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.
According to cyber security firms, at least 367 users transferred around $1,20,000 (over Rs 90 lakh) to hackers within two hours of the attack.
Twitter admitted its internal systems were compromised.
“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 said it has been taking aggressive steps to secure its systems while investigations are ongoing.
“We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can,” it said.
“We’re working to help people regain access to their accounts ASAP if they were proactively locked. This may take additional time since we’re taking extra steps to confirm that we’re granting access to the rightful owner,” Twitter informed.
The FBI has launched an investigation into the Twitter hack. The US Senate Commerce committee has also demanded that Twitter must brief it about the incident by July 23.
–IANS
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