Twitter reveals that its own employee tools contributed to unprecedented hack

Yash Aryan

July 15, 2020

In the afternoon of July 15, the most potent Twitter accounts across the USA went rogue and asked people to send in bitcoin, and double the amount will be sent back to them. In the four hours the tweets were live, the said bitcoin wallet gained over $100,000 via at least 300 transactions. Accounts of people like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and even handles of companies like Apple and Uber have fallen prey to this attack. The tweets were deleted, and the accounts were prevented from resetting passwords and being able to tweet, temporarily, as a preventive measure. The biggest attack on Twitter of all time is believed to be a coordinated social engineering whose targets were employees with access to Twitter's internal systems and tools. It is believed that the hack was carried out by a group rather than an individual. Further investigations are still in progress, and not much is known.

Abridged fromThe Verge