Twitter Gives More Insight into Crypto Scam Involving 130 Hacked Accounts

After yesterday’s Twitter incident that saw several high profile personal accounts hacked including the likes of Elon Musk, Kanye West, Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos, Apple and other cryptocurrency accounts.

According to Twitter Support, the attack was said to be towards approximately 130 accounts. “For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts,” said the social network.

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

Twitter said the hackers were able to gain access to its backend using internal admin tools and systems by targeting some of its employees who had access to them.

Although they were able to stop the hack by restricting verified accounts from tweeting, this was done after a lot of people seemed to have lost money to schemes of the attackers. The restricted verified accounts were reinstated shortly after and the tweets by the hackers subsequently deleted.

CNBC reports hackers gained “$121,000 from over 400 payments to three separate bitcoin addresses, according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic.”

In another response to this attack, Twitter said that it found no evidence that the hackers gained access to user passwords, and as a result, the company has no plans to deploy a mass of login credentials.

The hack is being invested by U.S. law enforcement agencies and the Twitter security team. As to how the deep the Twitter hack went and if the hackers were able to get private user information, that is still unknown as the investigation continues.