Twitter Admits 130 High Profile Accounts Targeted, As FBI Investigates

Twitter continues to feel the fallout from the unprecedented hack of its internal systems on Wednesday.

That hack saw the Twitter accounts belonging to some very public figures and corporations including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, as well as Apple and Uber, tweeting a bitcoin scam that offered to double people’s bitcoin payment.

So serious was the compromise that CEO Jack Dorsey issued an an immediate apology for the “co-ordinated” attack that targetted Twitter staff “with access to internal systems and tools”.

Internal systems

And now Twitter has disclosed on late Thursday as update about the cyber-attack.

“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,” tweeted Twitter’s support department.

“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 reiterated it was working with impacted account owners, some of whom had their verified accounts suspended for a number of hours.

Besides taking over Elon Musk and Bill Gates, other compromised accounts included Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Mike Bloomberg.

Readers can view screenshots of the compromised account tweets here.

FBI investigation

And so serious is the hack that the FBI’s San Francisco division has opened an investigation into the hacking, as many Washington lawmakers also questioning how it happened.

Twitter of course in headquartered in San Francisco, and the FBI will be assessing whether social engineering was using to get admin privileges to these 130 accounts, or whether a Twitter staff deliberately worked with the criminals.

The FBI has say the hackers committed cryptocurrency fraud, and the hack proved lucrative for the attackers.

Publicly available blockchain records reportedly show the alleged scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

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