Twitter Hit with Coordinated Social Engineering Attack, Hackers Receive Over Rs 88 Lakhs

Twitter on Wednesday was hit with an “coordinated social engineering attack” that resulted in takeovers of several Twitter accounts including individuals and companies like Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Apple. The attack resulted in the hackers promoting a bitcoin scam on the accounts that were compromised. The Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos and the US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden requested donations in the cryptocurrency. According to the publicly available records, the attackers received over BTC 12.86252562 from 373 transactions which translates roughly to Rs 88,99,721 or US$ 118,434.

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Twitter Reveals Employee Tools Contributed to the Attack

Following an initial investigation, Twitter said that the hackers targeted its employees with access to the platform’s internal systems and tools.

“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” Twitter Support said in a tweet.

Crucially, the company said that it is looking into the possibility of other “malicious activity” that may have been conducted during the attack.

“We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it,” Twitter Support said.

However, Twitter has not elaborated on how the attack was carried out or what internal tools were accessed by the hackers.

“Tough day for us at Twitter,” Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, said in a tweet. “We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”