Posted on July 31, 2020 at 3:42 PM

Twitter Hackers Leveraged Phone Spear Fishing In Mass Hack

Twitter has been making massive headlines due to the breach it had in its system. As details of the hack come out, bit by bit, it’s been revealed that a select amount of employees had been explicitly targeted through “phone spear phishing” attacks.

This comes by way of an announcement the social media giant made on Thursday. After the hackers failed to access account support tools through the employee credentials they stole, they tried again, targeting additional employees. As luck would have it, these employees had the needed access to the tools they wanted.

Details Slowly Being Unveiled

In a post, Twitter officials explained that the attack leveraged a significant amount of effort to exploit the human vulnerabilities within Twitter’s system, deceiving a select amount of employees.

Of course, Twitter was quick to recommit itself to keeping private information safe, vowing that the company takes this responsibility quite seriously. According to the social media platform’s statement, this is a stark reminder of just how important every single person within Twitter’s team was.

On an important notice, Twitter revealed that seven of the hacked accounts had their personal data downloaded. However, the social media platform saw fit to keep the identities of these hacked accounts to themselves, in their infinite attempts to control the damage.

Massive Bitcoin Scam Made

This post comes as the latest update to Twitter’s investigations regarding the massive hack that occurred on the platform. This hack, having occurred on the 15th of July, hijacked the Twitter accounts of some of the most well-known figures within twitter, be it celebrity, executive, or politician. The hackers then used these accounts to link Bitcoin scams, and abused the accounts of big names like Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Kanye West, and Elon Musk to facilitate their scam.

Twitter could only regain control of these accounts after a few hours, with some of these accounts being subject to a protracted tug-of-war between Twitter and the hackers. On multiple occasions, they managed to regain the Twitter account, continuing their own predatory agendas.

It was only after a few hours since the breach was contained when twitter finally responded, detailing how the platform lost control of its internal administrative systems. The reason for this loss of control was due to someone within the company’s employees being coerced, paid, or otherwise tricked into helping them. Since then, regular updates have been provided by company officials.

One of the most recent ones, coming last week, revealed that the hackers managed to read private messages from 36 hijacked accounts, with 130 of the affected users having phone numbers, as well as private messages, be viewable to the hackers.

Restructuring Underway

With the hack happening, critics were quick to pile on Twitter. A key argument being presented was that Twitter failed to implement a proper control in order to prevent company insiders, as well as people that target them, to gain sensitive user information.

Since then, Twitter has sworn high and low to figure out how the outsiders managed to gain access to the sensitive internal systems, and take steps to prevent such an attack from happening in the future.

With the latest update, a detailed explanation was given as to how the internal systems and account tools work for the employees of Twitter. Since then, Twitter stated that employees have had their access significantly reduced when it comes to internal systems and tools as the investigation continues.

A range of services has been limited temporarily as a result, but the most prominently affected one is the service that allows users to download their Twitter data.

As a result of all the ongoing developments, Twitter stated that it would be slower to respond to account support requests, as well as applications to its developer platform and reported Tweets in general. While apologies were made for these delays, Twitter describes them as mandatory precautions in order to make the changes to its process the platform needs to make sure this incident never happens again.