TOPLINE
Twitter said Wednesday that hackers responsible for a high-profile beach last week had access to direct messages from 36 users, including an elected official in the Netherlands, offering a troubling look at how much information was accessed in the hack.
Twitter CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey speaks during an exclusive interview with Hindustan Times on … [+]
KEY FACTS
Twitter said hackers accessed 36 out of 130 selected accounts from their direct message inbox.
The company said an elected official in the Netherlands violated his direct messages, but believes that no other current or former elected official had access to his messages.
Twitter did not name the Dutch politician, but the Wall street journal He reported that Geert Wilders, who is known to be an Islamophobic “Dutch Donald Trump”, was allegedly a victim.
Last week, hackers hijacked accounts belonging to dozens of high-profile figures, including Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, to tweet an unsophisticated bitcoin scam.
Since then, Twitter has said that hackers were able to tweet from 45 accounts, downloaded data from eight unverified accounts using the “Your Twitter Data” tool, and were able to view personal information such as emails and phone numbers for all of the selected accounts.
Key background
Although the hack was expansive and affected some of the world’s most powerful people, the hackers behind the rape were young, individual actors who wanted to sell coveted Twitter identifiers like “@y”, according to the New York Times. Twitter said hackers had access to their internal systems with a successful “social engineering” attack on multiple employees. Social engineering is a technique used by hackers to trick users into clicking malicious links or giving away sensitive data by crafting fake emails or other messages.
What to be careful
The FBI is investigating the hack.
