How we were hacked – Twitter explains

Twitter says none of the accounts that fell victim to data loss in the recent hack of its system were verified, adding that the perpetrators downloaded data from up to eight users involved.

On Wednesday, verified accounts owned by Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft; and Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX, were hacked alongside those of other high-profile users.

The company had said the unidentified attackers of its internal systems targeted 130 accounts and were able to reset passwords to take control of 45 of them and tweet from those accounts.

In its latest statement addressing the issue on Saturday, the microblogging platform said that it is now doing a forensic review of all the accounts to confirm all actions that may have been taken.

“We hope our openness and transparency throughout this process, and the steps and work we will take to safeguard against other attacks in the future, will be the start of making this right,” it wrote.

“There’s a lot of speculation about the identity of these 8 accounts. We’ll only disclose this to the impacted accounts. To address some of the speculations: none of the eight were Verified accounts.

“For up to eight of the Twitter accounts involved, the attackers took the additional step of downloading the account’s information through our ‘Your Twitter Data’ tool.

“We are reaching out to any account owner where we know this to be true. As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts.”

Among the accounts that were affected in the suspected Bitcoin scam were those of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon; Joe Biden, US democratic presidential aspirant; Kanye West; and Barack Obama.

Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them.