Twitter went through a serious security breach last week in which the hackers tweeted on behalf of the profile owners. Most of the targeted accounts belonged to several high-profile individuals.
Over the weekend, Twitter worked tirelessly not only to solve the issues but also to clarify their situation. Twitter mentioned that the attackers targeted 130 Twitter accounts which included the accounts of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.
With the 45 accounts, the attackers managed to reset the passwords, log into the accounts, and send out tweets. For another eight accounts, the attackers downloaded detailed information about their Twitter profiles using the “Yout Twitter Data” tool, and which also contained sensitive information including login IP and location information. Of the attacked accounts, 36 accounts had their DM box accessed by the attackers.
On July 17, Twitter mentioned, “There is a lot speculation about the identity of these 8 accounts. We will only disclose this to the impacted accounts, however, to address some of the speculations: none of the eight was Verified accounts.”
Twitter had to clarify the numbers and the kind of attack they went under so as to address some of the confusion of its users. Twitter had also mentioned that they are communicating directly with the impacted account owners.
Twitter emphasized time and again about the identity of the eight accounts, and reiterated that none of the accounts was verified.
Twitter will try to solve the problem as soon as possible as they are working tirelessly on this issue; however, the question that ultimately arises from this is obviously of Twitter’s security, and it is probable that it was not doing any fraud analytics to catch submission from odd locations, times, and other factors. Twitter certainly needs to improve its tracking of logs for the administrative interface.
