The FBI Has Launched An Official Inquiry Into Last Night’s Twitter Hack

The FBI has now launched an official inquiry into last night’s massive security breach and hack at Twitter, according to Reuters.

The FBI said earlier today:  “We are aware of today’s security incident involving several Twitter accounts belonging to high profile individuals. The accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud.”

Also today, Twitter has commented that there is “no evidence that attackers accessed the passwords of its users,” according to Bloomberg. Regardless, the company said it’s locking any accounts that have attempted to change its password during the past 30 days anyway. 

And while they may not have gotten passwords – the real question is whether or not they got the DMs…

By now, you probably already know about the massive Twitter hack that took place yesterday where, in summary, the following took place:

• A massive hack which allegedly has originated from a Twitter employee with access to the user management panel affected hundreds of billionaires and politicians, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Wiz Khalifa, Apple, Uber, Jeff Bezos, Benjamin Netanyahu

• Tweets urged people to send money to a Bitcoin address; over $113,000 has been sent so far

• Twitter has investigated and appears to have resolved most of the issue after taking down the offending Tweets and restoring access to the site for those with blue checkmarks, all of whom were previously shut down from the site

For the full details on the hack, you can read our report on it here. In addition to the hack, a subplot emerged last night when we reported that sources “close to or inside” the underground hacking community leaked a screenshot of what is allegedly an internal software panel used by Twitter to interact with user accounts. 

The tool is said to be used to help change ownership of popular accounts and, in the case of the hack, was said to play a role in usurping the high profile accounts involved. Screenshots of the supposed internal software are being aggressively pursued and deleted from Twitter by Twitter itself, with the company claiming that they violate the platform’s rules.

Of particular interest are the buttons labeled “SEARCH BLACKLIST” and “TRENDS BLACKLIST”.

We asked last night: Could these be tools actively used by Twitter to censor what Tweets and topics appear during searches and on its trends page?

Maybe the FBI will find some answers. We look forward to their findings…