Twitter hacked, several apartment accounts to high-ranking figures affected

This was billed as"The biggest hack in Twitter's history."

Since the day before yesterday, that is, last Wednesday, the news concerning the hacking of the social network has made the front page of several media. Twitter has indeed been targeted by a cyberattack, mainly directing to accounts with very high visibility like that of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Uber, Elon Musk at the same as Apple. Accounts targeted by the cyberattack began making posts aimed at pushing users to donate in the form of bitcoin to a BTC address, promising to grow their donation in return. Of course the scam was clearly visible.

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However, it has been observed that transactions made for the benefit of cybercriminals have been shown to be close to 100,000 euros, despite this in a way that has managed to trick some Internet users. These kinds of computer attacks can be the basis in the composition of the password. The less robust it is, the more likely the hacker is to be able to access the platform.

But according to the latest information from an internal source, the hacking was not initiated under any security flaw base. Apparently the cyber criminals, would have succeeded by using tools inside the social network. The procedure for taking control of the hacked accounts is explained by the specialized website Motherboard. According to the online media outlet, the hackers bribed a Twitter employee. This allowed them to use an internal Twitter administration tool. This assumption was confirmed by the social network in a recent tweet: "We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who have successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools," read one message.

The case of Twitter highlights a form of cyber malice that is neglected yet effective. This is social engineering, which involves manipulating an employee of the target company for the purpose of gaining access. And that's exactly what happened through employee corruption.

Here, as in most cyberattacks, the security flaw is human. As a result, cyber criminals were able to access one of the internal tools and simply changed the email addresses associated with the accounts they targeted. This had the advantage of not only giving them control of the hacked accounts, but also of preventing the real owners of those accounts from being able to access them. Can then not recover them without the help of the social network.

On the social network's side, he claimed to have reacted immediately by sometimes limiting the ability of cyber criminals to tweet with hacked accounts. Then came the password reset phase as well as several other features so as to completely exclude the control of cyber criminals. While some restrictions on these accounts have since been lifted, the internal investigation is still ongoing, according to Twitter.

On the other hand, this kind of computer hacking is in no way new. It is more common to observe this kind of cyber-malicious actions since the beginning of the year several personalities such as Elon Musk are commonly targeted by hackers. If it doesn't always work, more often than not, these attempts are ignored. This time, the attack hit several accounts. Endangering security is the image of Twitter. We are waiting for the response of the social network as well as the results of the investigations already underway.

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