The micro blogging site Twitter revealed that hackers targeted roughly 130 accounts during the massive attack that allowed them to take over dozens of high-profile accounts of tech companies, executives, and celebrities to promote a Bitcoin scam.
Hackers had accessed Twitter’s internal systems to hijack some of the platform’s top voices including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former U.S. President Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk and used them to solicit digital currency.
“Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident,” Twitter said.
Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident. For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 17, 2020
The company is also investigating if the attackers were able to access any non-public data related to the hijacked accounts.
The company also said in an update issued yesterday that it found no evidence of the attackers gaining access to the accounts passwords and that, currently, there is no need to reset any user passwords.
The law enforcement agency said that cyber attackers committed cryptocurrency fraud in the incident. Publicly available blockchain records show the apparent scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
“We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can,” Twitter added in its statement.
