Twitter Got Hacked - Social Engineering Strikes Again

What happened?

From threatpost:

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The Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Apple and Uber have each been hijacked at the same time to push a cryptocurrency scam in an unprecedented breach of Twitter accounts.

The accounts fell victim to a compromise of the company’s internal systems by a group of unidentified hackers that managed to gain access to Twitter company tools and secured employee privileges.

From Motherboard:

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A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts.

“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider. Motherboard granted the sources anonymity to speak candidly about a security incident. A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that the company is still investigating whether the employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to the tool.

From Bloomberg:

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In its investigation of the incident, Twitter will now likely focus on employee logs, email and phone records. At question will be any failures in authentication processes that might have allowed hackers to hijack verified accounts, and also what other information, such as direct messages, might have been compromised in the breach. The Bitcoin wallets promoted in the tweets collected around $120,000 in cryptocurrency.

A social engineering attack means “leveraging the human element of security” and there are many different ways to do that, said Rachel Tobac, Chief Executive Officer of San Francisco-based SocialProof Security. “I can phish someone who has administrative access and try and gain access to their credentials and log into their account,” she said, or the less technical method would be to develop “a relationship with someone who works on those panels and convincing them to do your bidding for you.”

Identifying potential Twitter employees to target wouldn’t be difficult for the hackers […} Anyone frequenting the same coffee shops and businesses or entering and leaving a workplace at particular hours can give away clues about themselves.

Tobac also raised the possibility that the attack could have been a distraction while hackers harvested private direct messages and any other confidential data to be able to deploy at a more critical time.

Twitter official updates:

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The greatest security vulnerability is always humans. We’re much more prone to error than computers :robot:

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