Nearly 130 High-Profile Accounts Affected by Massive Twitter Hack

Details are still emerging of how hackers managed to access internal Twitter tools, and gain control of a number of official accounts for prominent personalities and organizations, using those accounts to tweet posts promoting a fake bitcoin scam, Telegraph reported.

The social media firm said, of those that had been targeted, the hackers were able to gain control of "a small subset of accounts" and send tweets from them.

"We’re working with impacted account owners and will continue to do so over the next several days. We are continuing to assess whether non-public data related to these accounts was compromised, and will provide updates if we determine that occurred," the company said.

The latest update comes just hours after the FBI launched an inquiry into the hacking, whilst the UK's National Cyber Security Centre said it had "reached out" to Twitter.

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 (@TwitterSupport) July 17, 2020

It said that whilst "this appears to be an attack on the company rather than individual users, we would urge people to treat requests for money or sensitive information on social media with extreme caution".

The FBI meanwhile is said to be concerned over the sensitivity of the information that would be held on the accounts of affected individuals. A spokesman said: "The accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud."

The accounts affected by the hack had all sent a similar post, urging people to deposit money into a bitcoin wallet to receive double the amount back.

However, some are concerned that their private messages and personal information may also have been compromised, given the hackers appeared to have entire control of the accounts.

Twitter said it had been a “co-ordinated social engineering attack” that had “successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools”.

It is not yet clear whether those employees cooperated with the hackers, with Twitter telling media sites that Twitter it was still investigating whether or not an employee hijacked the accounts or gave the hackers direct access to the tools.