The “Direct Message” or DM inboxes of 130 users have recently been targeted by malicious hackers, who managed to access 36 of the inboxes. One of these belonged to a Netherlands government employee. Revealing details of the incident, Twitter on Thursday revealed it was another crypto attack.
The official account of Twitter support, in a thread, said they were investigating the matter.
We believe that for up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox, including 1 elected official in the Netherlands. To date, we have no indication that any other former or current elected official had their DMs accessed.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 22, 2020
As of now, Twitter has yet to provide details showing which people were targeted in the attack and how many countries were affected. The micro-blogging site has said it will be reaching out to the targeted users as soon as they get more information.
“We are communicating directly with any impacted account owners, and will share updates here when we have them,” Twitter support wrote.
Users are confused as to whether these 36 violated inboxes are related to the crypto-hack attack that posted malicious bitcoin links via the accounts of prominent American people and companies including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezon, Apple and Uber.
The social networking platform, which has 152 million users globally, admitted that the cryptocurrency hack was a “coordinated social engineering attack” by people who successfully targeted some of their employees with access to internal systems and tools. CEO Jack Dorsey had also admitted the case has been rough for the company.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
