The hackers who carried out a spectacular attack on the accounts of personalities and companies on July 15 had access to the direct mail boxes (DM) of 36 users, including a Dutch elected official, Twitter said on his blog dedicated to this case.
"At present, we have no indication that other elected officials or former elected officials have seen their DMs violated," Twitter said on Wednesday. Among the 130 accounts that were hacked in mid-July are those of Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for the White House, former President Barack Obama, rapper Kanye West, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos or several large companies.
Withdraw bitcoins
Twitter had indicated on Saturday that the hackers had succeeded in penetrating 45 of them, thanks to “the use of tools only accessible to internal support teams”. From the hacked accounts, the hackers sent flirtatious messages urging 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 thus been sent.
Twitter also clarified Saturday that for eight of these accounts, the hackers had also downloaded data normally only accessible to the owner of the account. None of these accounts were verified, that is to say, endowed with the distinctive little “V” which increases their credibility and gives certain privileges to users. Twitter also indicated that thanks to the tools they had taken control of, hackers had managed to overcome the barrier of two-factor authentication that normally allows an account to be secured beyond a simple password.
This spectacular action, on which the American Federal Police (FBI) opened an investigation, triggered 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 managed to seize the account of Donald Trump, who often conducts his diplomacy on Twitter, where he has 83.5 million subscribers. The @realDonaldTrump account was not hacked in the attack on July 15.
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