The perpetrators of last week’s unprecedented Twitter hack accessed the direct messages of “up to 36” affected accounts, the company has confirmed. The accounts include that of an unnamed “elected official in the Netherlands”, believed be far-right legislator Geert Wilders.
Although the internal investigation into last week’s hack, which affected more than 100 accounts and was primarily used to promote a bitcoin-based scam that raised less than $200,000 (£157,000), is ongoing, Twitter said on Thursday that the impact was greater than was publicly visible.
According to the New York Times, the attack was not particularly sophisticated: a confidant of one of the attackers, a 21-year-old British man in Spain, told the paper that the ringleader had “got access to the Twitter credentials when he found a way into Twitter’s internal Slack messaging channel and saw them posted there, along with a service that gave him access to the company’s servers”. If the company’s investigations are accurate, then the hack may turn out to be significantly less damaging than it could have been. Political figures including Joe Biden were hit by the attack, but the hackers, who came from an online community mostly devoted to stealing and reselling valuable usernames, seemed satisfied with promoting a bitcoin scam, rather than attempting to uncover and disseminate private communications.
Source: Guardian
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