Washington (AFP)
The hackers who orchestrated the spectacular attack on Twitter accounts of celebrities and political figures "successfully manipulated a small number of employees" of Twitter, the social network said in a blog on Saturday.
Twitter said that in total the hackers targeted 130 accounts and managed to penetrate 45 thanks to "the use of tools only accessible to internal support teams".
Among these hacked accounts were political leaders like the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama but also big bosses like Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla or Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.
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.
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 was verified, that is to say endowed with the distinctive small v which increases its 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.
This spectacular action, on which the federal police (FBI) has opened an investigation, sparked a debate on the security of social platforms a few months before the presidential election in November in the United States but also on the possible consequences if hackers arrive at seize the account of Donald Trump, who often conducts his diplomacy on Twitter, where he has 83.5 million subscribers.
On Wednesday, @realdonaltrump was not hacked.
© 2020 AFP