Billionaires and corporate accounts targeted under Twitter hack

AKIPRESS.COM - Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other high-profile Twitter account holders were the targets of a widespread hack to offer fake bitcoin deals on July 15 in one of the most pronounced security breaches on a social media site, Washington Post reports.
Accounts for former US president Barack Obama, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, musician Kanye West and both Uber and Apple also posted similar tweets, all instructing people to send cryptocurrency to the same bitcoin address. The tweets were removed throughout the afternoon, shortly after being posted.
There have been hacks of high-profile individual accounts on Twitter before, including Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey last year. But the widespread nature of this attack suggested an unusually broad access to internal controls.
While it was unclear how the attacks originated or why they went on for hours, some cybersecurity experts speculated that someone may have gained access to internal Twitter controls that allowed them to take over and post on the accounts.
The attack also partially shut down the network. Twitter said in a tweet on Wednesday afternoon that some users weren't able to tweet while it was addressing the incident. Users with the check mark indicating that their accounts were verified by Twitter reported that they weren't able to tweet.
Twitter said in a later tweet that it "detected a coordinated attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools." The hackers used that access to take over the accounts.
Cybersecurity experts warned that this type of breach, where influential accounts are taken over, could have devastating effects if used for something more dangerous than to take money from unsuspecting users. The consequences could be greater if it involved an account like Donald Trump's or spread misinformation on some type of global security threat.
Some of the people who were hacked indicated that they had turned on two-factor authentication and were using strong passwords, which typically makes unauthorized account access much more difficult.
SocialProof Security's Tobac said one likely scenario could be that hackers gained access to the back end of Twitter's employee administration panel, which could include access to change account passwords. This could have happened by a hacker stealing an employee's credentials, especially if an employee didn't have secure multifactor authentication turned on.
It's also unclear how much information the hackers were able to cull from the accounts they compromised. If they were able to access the accounts' direct messages they might have stolen information they could leak later to embarrass people or to sow chaos during the 2020 election or another major event, said Theresa Payton, CEO of the cybersecurity company Fortalice Solutions and a former White House technology official.
This is a serious reminder of how important Internet security is, especially leading up to the election, she said. "Today should be a tsunami bell warning for all social media companies," she said.