Security News > 2020 > July > Hackers Used Internal Twitter Tools to Hijack High-Profile Accounts
Twitter has confirmed that hackers leveraged internal tools to take over high-profile accounts and use them to post scam tweets.
After containing the incident and closing the unauthorized access, Twitter confirmed that the hackers used social engineering to target "Employees with access to internal systems and tools."
"We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible 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 said.
Reacting to Twitter's messages, some people raised the issue of internal tools having too much access to user account data, while others questioned the claim of this being a social engineering attack and suggesting internal help.
In 2017, a series of high-profile accounts were compromised through Twitter Counter, while in September 2019 Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had his account compromised in a SIM swapping attack.