The Twitter hack that we live in Spain with great tension was considered the largest in the history of the platform. Accounts of huge personalities like Tim Cook, Barack Obama or Joe Biden were hacked in a macro cryptocurrency scam. This past Thursday, Twitter has revealed important details about this hack.
Twitter has claimed that hackers who accessed the platform’s internal systems attacked around 130 accounts, all of them from personalities, organizations and influencers. A cybersecurity disaster that involved people like Kim Kardashian or the President of the United States himself, Donald Trump.
In its latest statement on the subject, Twitter has assured that these hackers obtained control of a “small subset” of some target accounts and thus send tweets from them.
130 accounts affected
We’ve been working around the clock and will continue to provide updates here.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Twitter also added that it has continued to evaluate whether or not attackers could access private data from the accounts that were attacked. This is especially important, given that a large majority of these accounts had 2-step verification, so if data were extracted they would be very intimate, as internal MDs.
Among the 130 accounts affected, you could see those of rapper Kanye West, that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos or that of billionaire Bill Gates. They were not the only ones; accounts of companies like Apple or Uber were also affected. The social network has assured that it is collaborating with the owners of the affected accounts to solve the consequences of the Twitter hack.
The FBI has become involved
The FBI division in San Francisco is investigating what happened, as we can read in Reuters. Lawmakers in Washington are asking for a report on what happened, as there was speculation of a possible security hole for potentially extreme danger.
The department has claimed that cyber attackers committed fraud with the cryptocurrency scam. Available records show that scammers received more than $ 100,000 in cryptocurrencies, proving that their plan was successful.
Finally, Twitter has limited itself to making concise statements about the event. “We are still in the process of evaluating the long-term steps we can take and we will share more details as soon as we can,” the social network added. It is not known whether Twitter will take measures of any kind to improve its security, or if, on the contrary, the hack will encourage other cybercriminals to carry out the same events.