By Aaron Miller-
The breach of Twitter’s loss of internal control systems to attackers who hijacked several high-profile accounts exposes alarming vulnerabilities in the the world’s most influential social media platform.
Twitter accounts belonging to Elon Musk, Obama, Biden, Bezos, Gates were all compromised in a coordinated scam.
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The first compromise occurred around 1pm California time when the twitter accounts belonging to former Vice President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other people with millions or tens of millions of followers began an attempt to scam people into transferring cryptocurrency to attacker-controlled wallets.
Twitter officials later claimed in a tweet that the attackers took control by tricking or otherwise convincing employees to hand over credentials.
“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,” the tweet said.
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“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. 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.”
Upon discovery, Twitter personnel locked down the accounts and removed the tweets, although Musk’s account posted fraudulent tweets after previous ones had been deleted.
Concerns that the compromise could have led to serious national security breaches have been raised, especially if it those belonging to President Trump or government agencies and done much worse than replay a cryptocurrency scam that has been going on for years.
Attackers have in the past breached security data by sending private tweets from accounts including those belonging to then-President-elect Barack Obama and Fox News.
Just hours after Wednesday’s breach came to light, US Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking that he contact the FBI to make sure the site is secure.
“I am concerned that this event may represent not merely a coordinated set of separate hacking incidents but rather a successful attack on the security of Twitter itself,” Hawley wrote. “As you know, millions of your users rely on your service not just to tweet publicly but also to communicate privately through your direct message service. A successful attack on your system’s servers represents a threat to all of your users’ privacy and data security.”
Uncorroborated allegations have been made that a Twitter insider was paid for the passwords that allowed the compromised tweets. The post went on to show a panel controlling the account of Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange whose Twitter personna was hijacked.
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