Twitter apologizes. Saturday, July 18, the social network with the little blue bird said that the hackers who orchestrated the spectacular attack on Twitter accounts of celebrities and political figures "successfully manipulated a small number of employees". The social network says it is aware of the blow to the trust of users.

Twitter said that in total the hackers targeted 130 accounts and managed to penetrate 45 of them, thanks to "the use of tools only accessible to internal support teams".

That's a very small number compared to the total number of users (about 330 million monthly users or 166 million daily users) but among these hacked accounts were political leaders like the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden , former President Barack Obama and big bosses like Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla or Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

The aim of the pirates seemed to be to make quick money, if we are to believe their mode of operation. From hacked accounts, hackers sent enticing messages inciting subscribers to send bitcoins, a cryptocurrency, in exchange for double the amount sent.

According to specialized sites which record bitcoin exchanges but do not allow the recipients to be traced, some 100,000 dollars have been sent.

>> Read: Twitter hacking: "toxic" loot for cybercriminals

Downloading data

Twitter said on Saturday that for eight of these accounts, hackers also downloaded data, which is normally only available to the account owner. None of these accounts were certified, that is to say with the distinctive little blue badge which increases their credibility and gives certain privileges to users.

Twitter also said that thanks to the tools they had taken control of, hackers managed to cross the barrier of double authentication, which normally makes it possible to secure an account beyond a simple password.

The social network has not yet given any details on the employees involved in this hacking, nor on the identity of the hackers.

There is a lot speculation about the identity of these 8 accounts. We will only disclose this to the impacted accounts, however to address some of the speculation: none of the eight were Verified accounts.

- Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 18, 2020

They had access to personal information from account holders, including email addresses and phone numbers.

According to the New York Times, everything started from a mysterious hacker operating under the name of "Kirk" and having internal access. The hackers interviewed by the daily claimed to have participated only in the takeover of lesser-known accounts, but in the names prized by certain internet users, in order to resell them against bitcoins.

With AFP

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