Twitter says hackers “manipulated” some of its employees to access accounts in a high-profile attack on the social media company, including those of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Posts trying to dupe people into sending the hackers Bitcoin were tweeted by the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Bill Gates and many others on Wednesday, forcing Twitter to lock a large number of accounts in a damage control move.
More than $100,000 worth of the virtual currency was sent to email addresses mentioned in the tweets, according to Blockchain.com, which monitors crypto transactions.
“We know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts,” said a statement posted on Twitter’s blog on Saturday.
For 45 of those accounts, the hackers were able to reset passwords, login and send tweets, it added, while the personal data of up to eight unverified users was downloaded.
Twitter locked down affected accounts and removed the fraudulent tweets. It also shut down accounts not affected by the hack as a precaution. Most of those have now been restored, the company said on Saturday.
