Massive Twitter hack, Twitter CEO gives lowdown on the attack. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey took to Twitter to express his lament following a massive Twitter hack involving some of the industries’ most prominent figures.
A massive hack , described as “a coordinated social engineering attack” by Twitter – targeted multiple high-profile users last night. From the likes of ex-US President Barack Obama, Tesla’s Elon Musk, investor Warren Buffet and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded to the attack this morning, saying it was a “tough day for us at Twitter”.
Dorsey continues to add “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.”
Speaking on the attack, Twitter shared “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.”
In an extraordinary measure, Twitter disabled the affected accounts and removed tweets posted by the hackers. The firm also initially limited the functionalities of other verified accounts and however later Twitted that the functionalities have been restored.
The infamous tweet that shook the firm read “I am giving back Bitcoin to all of my followers. I am doubling all payments sent to the Bitcoin address below. You send 0.1 BTC, I send 0.2 BTC back!”
Among other high profile accounts that were affected were those of rapper Kanye West, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple.
Several accounts of cryptocurrency-focused organizations were also hijacked. Altogether, the affected accounts had tens of millions of users.
This is not the first time a massive hack has been reported on Twitter. In March 2017, hackers suspected to have been loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hacked into the accounts of Amnesty International, the French Ministry of Economics and the BBC’s North America service.
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 (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
[image: Pixabay]
