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Hackers targeted about 130 Twitter accounts in their unprecedented attack on some of the platform’s most visible users this week, the company revealed. The attackers were only able to take over a “small subset” of the targeted accounts — including those owned by Apple, Uber, Kanye West and Elon Musk — that they used to …
Hackers targeted about 130 Twitter accounts in their unprecedented attack on some of the platform’s most visible users this week, the company revealed.
The attackers were only able to take over a “small subset” of the targeted accounts — including those owned by Apple, Uber, Kanye West and Elon Musk — that they used to post fraudulent tweets, Twitter said in a statement late Thursday.
The San Francisco-based firm said it is “working with impacted account owners” while it examines whether the hackers compromised their private data.
“We have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing,” the company said.
The FBI and other law-enforcement authorities are also probing the attack, in which hackers infiltrated more than a dozen high-profile Twitter accounts to push a bitcoin scam. The affected accounts belonged to major business and political figures including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett.
More than 400 payments worth $121,000 flowed into three bitcoin addresses mentioned in the bogus tweets, according to Elliptic, a cryptocurrency analysis firm. The majority of the money came from Asia-based exchanges — including a single payment worth $42,000 — but about a quarter of the proceeds likely came from North American victims, Elliptic said.
The hackers reportedly paid a Twitter employee to help them carry out the attack. The company acknowledged that the hackers targeted staffers who had access to internal tools and systems.
