Twitter has now issued its version of events after experiencing a massive hack, saying DMs information may have been stolen. This is in response to the biggest security lapse in its history, which turned out to be a Bitcoin scam targeting some of the highest-profile Twitter accounts.
The accounts compromised included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, and more.
Twitter says that the hackers may actually have downloaded the direct messages (DMs) of up to eight of these individuals. While conducting the Bitcoin scam, they were able to see and probably steal ‘personal information’ from the accounts. This will likely include phone numbers and email addresses.
The hackers attempted downloading the entire ‘Your Twitter Data’ archive for those eight accounts. ‘Your Twitter Data’ contains DMs among other personal information.
Twitter also tweeted that it was reaching out to the account owners after concluding its investigations.
For up to eight of the Twitter accounts involved, the attackers took the additional step of downloading the account’s information through our “Your Twitter Data” tool. We are reaching out directly to any account owner where we know this to be true.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 18, 2020
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The most dangerous part about trying to access ‘Your Twitter Data’ is that the hackers could download DMs that the affected eight individuals had tried to delete. This is because Twitter stores DMs on its servers as long as either account in the conversation keeps them around, so they could have been compromised in a hack.
It is also possible to get back deleted DMs by downloading the ‘Your Twitter Data’ archive. This is even if you’ve deleted them yourself. The archive can also include other personal information like your contacts and any photos and videos attached to the DMs.
Twitter says none of the eight accounts are verified, however.
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 speculation: none of the eight were Verified accounts.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 18, 2020
Twitter now confirms that the hackers “successfully manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems, including getting through our two-factor protections.” The company had in confirming the attack said that its internal employee tools were compromised, suspecting that its employees had fallen for a social engineering scam.
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