The Twitter hack that took place early in the week was orchestrated by a group of young hackers who managed to commandeer 130 accounts to enact a Bitcoin scam, earning $121,000 from over 400 accounts.
A number of high-profile accounts such as Elon Musk, former president Barack Obama, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden were hijacked, with the hackers tweeting out messages from these accounts asking their followers to send Bitcoin to an anonymous address, according to CNBC.
The investigation that soon followed revealed that the hack had started out as a couple playful messages on Discord—an instant chat platform popular with gamers around the world.
Twitter said: "Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident."
Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident. For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 17, 2020
They added that "for a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts."
The ease with which these hackers were able to penetrate one of the largest social media platforms in the world has raised a number of questions, such as why Twitter appears to have a function where they are able to, en masse, turn off the "tweet" function for every blue-checked account simultaneously.
Former chief security officer of Facebook, Alex Stamos, shared with CNBC's "Squawk Box" that "these attackers were the equivalent of stealing a McLaren F1, taking it for a joyride and then crashing it into a telephone pole 4 minutes later."
“There is so much more damage that could have been done.”
CNBC reported that Twitter suspects the hack was a "coordinated social engineering attack" where insiders at Twitter were tricked into surrendering access to internal systems and tools.
“The biggest area of risk for almost any company is the insider threat,” Stamos noted. “To operate your business, you have to provide data and access to thousands and thousands of employees.”
It is not clear whether the hackers gained access to the direct messages of the compromised accounts. Twitter added that "currently, we don't believe resetting your password is necessary," as there is no evidence to support the idea that the hackers acquired personal passwords from individual accounts.
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