Employees Manipulated And Credentials Used For Access By Attackers, Says Twitter About Bitcoin Hack

In the latest update on the ongoing investigations into the massive Bitcoin hack, Twitter has said that attackers may have manipulated employees to divulge confidential information.

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New Delhi: Twitter has said that credentials of their employees were used for the massive Bitcoin hack that happened on July 15 in which high profile celebrity accounts such as that of former US President Barack Obama and rapper Kanye West were affected. Twitter has informed through its blog, recent updates regarding the investigation into the incident, and has said that the attackers may have manipulated its employees using social engineering schemes to manipulate the employees so that they can access confidential information. ‘We believe attackers targeted certain Twitter employees through a social engineering scheme. What does this mean? In this context, social engineering is the intentional manipulation of people into performing certain actions and divulging confidential information. The attackers successfully manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems, including getting through our two-factor protections, ‘said Twitter in its blog. During the ongoing investigation, they have also found that the attackers used tools that available only to internal teams and they also made attempts to sell usernames. ‘We know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts. For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send Tweets. In addition, we believe they may have attempted to sell some of the usernames.’ Twitter also clarified that soon after the hack they took 'measures to restrict functionality for many accounts on Twitter - this included things like preventing them from Tweeting or changing passwords' these have now been restored especially on those accounts that were locked pending password changes for their owners. In what appears to be a cryptocurrency scam several high-profile Twitter accounts were affected including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates, Former President Barack Obama, Kanye West, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Mike Bloomberg. These accounts showed almost similar messages about doubling bitcoin payment.