Twitter Says 130 Accounts Compromised In Wednesday’s Hack, Vows “Aggressive” Security Measures

Twitter has now said about 130 accounts were compromised by the hack that took the platform by storm roughly 48 hours ago. The company said on Thursday that it was taking “aggressive” security measures.

“Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident,” Twitter’s support team said.

Then, in a non-committal follow up, it said: “We have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing.”

We don’t know about you but that certainly makes us feel better… 

Recall, yesterday, we noted that the FBI had launched an official inquiry into Wednesday night’s massive security breach, according to Reuters.

The FBI said on Thursday:  “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 on Thursday, Twitter had previously 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…

Recall, there was a massive hack on Wednesday that allegedly originated from a Twitter employee with access to its user management panel. The hack affected hundreds of billionaires and politicians, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Wiz Khalifa, Apple, Uber, Jeff Bezos and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Tweets urged people to send money to a Bitcoin address; over $113,000 has been sent so far that we know about. 

Twitter investigated at the time of the hack and now 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 on Wednesday 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. 

Source: Vice

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…