Security News > 2020 > July > Twitter: Hackers Accessed Private Messages for Elite Accounts

Hackers accessed direct messages for 36 of the 130 high-profile users whose accounts were hacked in an unprecedented account breach last week, Twitter confirmed Wednesday.

The company also tweeted a clarification to differentiate between a previous update to the hack in which they said hackers downloaded an archive of "Your Twitter Data" from eight of the 130 accounts, adding that none of these were verified accounts.

Twitter immediately locked down thousands of verified accounts belonging to high-profile Twitter users and high-profile companies to try to prevent hackers from perpetrating the scam, which involved sending tweets from each of the hijacked accounts to promote a bogus advance-fee cryptocurrency deal, promising to double the value of Bitcoin currency sent to one specific wallet.

Eventually, Twitter revealed that there was a compromise of the company's internal systems by a group of unidentified hackers; they managed to gain access to Twitter company tools and secured employee privileges to mount a widespread social-engineering attack.

Another plausible theory also emerged that that screenshots of Twitter's internal tools appeared on underground forums ahead of the attacks due to a bribe of a lone rogue Twitter employee, but Twitter later refuted this claim.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/twitter-hackers-private-messages-elite-accounts/157657/