Late on Thursday, Twitter disclosed that hackers had targeted about 130 accounts during this week’s cyber attack, an incident in which profiles of many prominent personalities and organizations including Apple Inc. were compromised.
Hackers had accessed Twitter’s internal systems to hijack some of the platform’s top voices including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former U.S. President Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk and used them to solicit digital currency.
In its latest statement, Twitter said that the hackers were able to gain control to a “small subset” of the targeted accounts, and send tweets from them.
The company added that it was continuing to assess whether the attackers were able to access private data of the targeted accounts.
The high-profile accounts that were hacked also included rapper Kanye West, Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, and the corporate accounts for Uber Technologies Inc and Apple Inc.
MacDailyNews Note: The FBI is investigating Twitter attack, with many Washington lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), also calling for an explanation.
The FBI says that the cyber attackers committed cryptocurrency fraud in the incident. Publicly available blockchain records show the apparent scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency, according to reports.
