Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site, is currently in the middle of a massive breach that has seen the accounts of a number of prominent individuals hacked.
4wardwego reports that the list of accounts hacked numbers some of the world’s most influential people.
Indeed, the list reads like a who’s who. Among them are former US President Barack Obama; Amazon CEO and world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos; presumptive US Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden; Microsoft founder, Bill Gates; Tesla and Space X CEO, Elon Musk; rap mogul, Kanye West and publishing magnate Michael Bloomberg. Also, there are a number of yet unknown verified and un-verified that have been hacked as well.
Meanwhile, 4wardwego can confirm that the unprecedented Twitter breach began on Wednesday.
The Twitter accounts of some of the micro-blogging site’s most high-profile users began sending out scam messages. Most of the messages promised to double Bitcoin contributions sent to a wallet address.
Consequently, the micro-blogging site has gone ahead to suspend all verified accounts in its effort to stem the hack.
Meanwhile, Twitter has shed some light on the unprecedented attack. In a series of tweets posted this evening under its support channel; Twitter said that its internal systems were compromised by the hackers. This confirmed speculations that the attack could not have been conducted without access to the company’s own tools and employee privileges.
“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,” the first tweet in a multi-tweet explainer thread reads. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf.”
Indeed, the sheer number of accounts spouting identical messages; as well as the number of high profile (and presumably secure) Twitter accounts had many speculating that Twitter’s infrastructure had been compromised, rather than the individual accounts. Also, the sheer breadth of the compromise fuelled speculation that hackers had discovered a way to compromise a Twitter API; (application programming interface) or internal customer portal.
Reports indicate that while the identity of the individual(s) behind the account is not yet known; the motive behind the hack seems to have been achieved. Latest figures indicate that the Bitcoin account linked to the spam messages had been sent 12.86 Bitcoin. This is equivalent to almost $118,000. However, it is unclear if all the transactions were linked to the scam messages.
Also, reports indicate that the hack was well planned in advance.
Forbes revealed that Klijnsma, the head of threat research at the firm RiskIQ; had identified a sprawling network of close to 400 web domains created, in advance, to support the scam. They included domains such as billgatescoins.com and muskgive.com. This suggests that the attackers had their eyes on high profile and verified accounts before launching the attack.
