Last week, we reported about a Twitter hack that can be said as the most extensive hack on Twitter in a long time or maybe ever that also caused a lot of financial damage to the users of the platform. This is because hackers took control of some of the celebrity accounts on the platform and tweeted a Bitcoin scam tweet and unsuspecting users also sent bitcoin donations to the address mentioned in the tweet. Now, the accounts used were some of the high-profile ones like of Barack Obama, Apple, Joe Biden among others which should tell you that people were likely to believe them.
Since Twitter came to know in 30 minutes time regarding the tweet and the hack, they removed all the said tweets and removed hackers from inside their platform. However, it was too late because the damage had been done. Until now, we were only told that the hackers took control of these accounts to tweet what they did. However, Twitter has now also acknowledged that the hackers accessed direct messages of at least 36 users in that hack as well.
The company says that information from 8 of these accounts was also downloaded which might be used for blackmailing and ransom as well. Twitter reveals that hackers downloaded the entire data through Twitter’s own feature available for everyone known as the “Your Twitter Data”. On top of that, the 36 accounts that had their messages from DM read and possibly stored as well included one elected official from the Netherlands. On the 45 accounts that were clearly hacked, “hackers initiated a password reset, logged into the account, and sent new tweets to promote their cryptocurrency scam.” New York Times reports that hackers first hacked Slack accounts of Twitter employees and found the access to tools from there which were used for the hack.
