On July 15th, Twitter experienced a widespread hack that impacted several celebrity accounts although for a short amount of time.
During the cyber-attack, there was an estimated 130 Twitter accounts impacted some of the most notable ones belonging to influential people such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Kanye West, and Elon Musk. Out of all the 130 accounts that were compromised, Twitter officials claim that only a small subset of those accounts were actually being controlled by the hackers.
While the widespread hack was primarily related to a bitcoin-scam, twitter released the following statement about the incident: “We are continuing to assess whether non-public data related to these accounts was compromised” and the FBI is now investigating the matter.
All of this started with multiple bitcoin-related accounts on the app tweeting a commonly used and well-known scam which promises to double any amount of bitcoin you send to the stated address in the tweet. While this may have gone unnoticed if it had only stayed active on fairly unknown Twitter accounts, it gained widespread attention when it started to impact the Twitter accounts of famous celebrities.
Details of The Hack
In an attempt to hamper the full effectiveness of the Twitter hack, the company temporarily limited all of its verified users from being able to make any new tweets until they resolved the problem. According to the data that Twitter has on the hacks now, the malicious actors were able to bypass account security by way of accessing Twitter’s own internal administration tools.
Some pretty big-name accounts were affected by the hack including Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian, Uber, and Apple. People were surprised that out of all the affected accounts, US President Donald Trump was seemingly unaffected. While the attack didn’t last long, people were duped by the attackers as the team of hacker received a total of about $100,000.
Even though the hack was handled appropriately, there are still a lot of questions surrounding who the exact attackers were and how to prevent situations like this from happening in the future.
Moving Forward
An investigation into who the hackers who were responsible for the attacks has been launched and early findings show that there may be some possible links to cyber-crime firm Hudson Rock as to who the exact perpetrators of the attack are. One of the most compelling pieces of evidence that Twitter currently has against the perpetrators of this attack is a screenshot posted to social media of a control panel that only high-level Twitter employees have access to.
As the investigation is still ongoing, tech experts and loyal twitter users everything are eager to find out the results so they can determine what the future looks like for one of their favorite apps.