The social media giant Twitter suffered a major security breach last week when hackers managed to hack into accounts of high profile people, including former US President Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and many others. Now the social media company has revealed that hackers managed to access the Direct Messages of 8 accounts out of 130 that were compromised during the hack to solicit bitcoins from their followers.
Hackers accessed Direct Messages of 36 accounts.
Twitter support account revealed that hackers had managed to access the direct messages of eight high profile accounts, including one elected official in the Netherlands. However, a Twitter spokesperson clarified that hackers did not access DMs of the former US President Barack Obama and former vice president, Joe Biden. Hackers had put out tweets from the compromised accounts of famous people soliciting bitcoins in promise to make them double. Twitter managed to take down the tweets, but the damage was done as hackers managed to get away with over $100,000 that they are trying to launder now. However, the impact of the security breach can not be measured in monetary terms.
36 is the number of accounts where the attacker took control of the account and viewed the DM inbox on https://t.co/gp7v7rSXyX.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 23, 2020
The FBI is investigating the Twitter hack.
The recent Twitter hack raised a lot of questions about users’ privacy on the microblogging platform. If the accounts belonging to people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden can be hacked, then it is only fair to ask questions about the privacy and security of non-verified users on the platform. The hackers also downloaded data of eight users during the hack, but the social media giant revealed that those accounts belonged to unverified users. The hackers seem to launder the solicited funds from the hack by moving them to peer-to-peer and gambling platforms. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating the high profile hack.
