Social-Media
Twitter says passwords were saved in yesterday's attack, but it's still trying to recover locked accounts.
Twitter says it has "no evidence" that user passwords have been compromised as part of yesterday 's huge assault on the company's internal infrastructure, but it also works to regain access to locked accounts. Updates were shared as part of a series of tweets posted on Thursday afternoons.
Attackers hijacked the accounts of some of the most widely followed people on Twitter, including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Kanye West, to post bitcoin scams.
Last night, the company decided to close many accounts as a precaution to reduce further damage caused by the attacks, and provided more details as to why the accounts were locked in the tweets this afternoon.
As part of the additional security measures we’ve taken, you may not have been able to reset your password. Other than the accounts that are still locked, people should be able to reset their password now.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
While Twitter says it doesn't believe that passwords have been compromised, it remains uncertain if attackers have been able to access direct messages.
In addition to closing several accounts, Twitter also fully removed the ability of all verified accounts to tweet last night for a few hours after the hack, while verified accounts could still retweet existing tweets while the restrictions were in effect.
Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Twitter announced last night that its own internal resources had been compromised in the attack. "We have observed what we suspect to be a concerted social engineering assault by people who have successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and resources," Twitter said in a tweet sent yesterday at 10:38PM ET. Two anonymous sources told Motherboard that they had been helped by a Twitter employee to take over the accounts, one claiming they had paid the employee for their assistance.
