The hijacking of high profile Twitter accounts on Wednesday may have been an inside job.
Vice News and CNET are reporting that the hackers may have convinced a Twitter employee, or multiple employees, to grant access to protected internal systems.
"The hackers actually went after specific employees who work at Twitter who have access to these behind the scenes systems, and were able to convince them somehow - through tricking them or whatever else - to get their passwords and then get access to these internal systems," said CNET Executive Editor Ian Sherr.
It is not clear whether the employee or employees were aware that they were granting access to outside actors.
On Wednesday afternoon, the accounts of prominent figures including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and the corporate accounts of Uber and Apple appeared to have been hijacked, posting similar scam messages asking followers to send bitcoin with the promise of doubling their money.
Twitter CEO
Jack Dorsey posted this apology to the platform.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.-- to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack)
July 16, 2020 "The supposed hackers - or someone connected to them - sent screenshots to both Vice and to us at CNet, showing us what the internal systems look like," Sherr told KCBS Radio. "But it’s a really concerning issue that anyone could get access to these systems when they’re not supposed to."
Twitter officials say the company is investigating the breach and called it a “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport)
July 16, 2020 The FBI has also launched an investigation into what is being called the worst ever hack of a social media platform.
It is unclear how much the hackers made in the scam, but it is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
