Twitter Confirms that DMs of 36 High Profile Users Were Affected by Hack

Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) has confirmed that the historic compromise of its platform saw the hackers access the direct message (DM) of 36 high profile individuals including former Vice-President and Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden. The historic hack of Twitter which affected a total of 130 accounts has a cross-continental effect as major cryptocurrency exchanges around the world were affected as well as an elected  Dutch official.

The attack on Twitter was basically used to carry out Bitcoin (BTC) theft in which Coinspeaker reported that about $121,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) was gotten by the attackers. While the initial focus had been placed on the monetary quantification of the hack, a more situation of concern is fear by the twitter users on the safety of information shared using the platform. In the past week, the incident has had a tremendous impact on TWTR stock, a situation that is gradually correcting as the stocks gained 0.65% to hit $37.18 after hours of trading on Thursday.

Twitter Updates Impact of the Hack

As obligated as the Twitter Corporation is, they have been keeping the world updated since the incident happened, the most recent of which was published on July 22. Twitter claimed that initial attack was targeted at staff of the corporation whom they manipulated to gain access to their “credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems, including getting through our two-factor protections”. The social media giant’s most recent news was summarized in a Twitter blog post:

“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”.

As explained, the attackers were not able to view previous account passwords in the course of the attack as those were not saved in plain text or accessible through the means the attackers used to get into the system. Nonetheless, the thieves were able to view the user’s personal information including their phone numbers and email addresses. While the corporation confirmed that investigations are still ongoing, the world is agog on what the attack might cost the firm in the long term.

Probable Implications of the Hack

Since the attack was launched last week, several worse case scenarios have been painted. The popular cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase reportedly prevented 1,000 users from sending Bitcoins to the scammers who demanded masses to send BTC to a particular BTC address. The United States-based exchange saved its customers about 30.4 BTC worth of cash.

While the public trust in Twitter’s platform is largely low, there may be cases of litigation in the coming days considering the probable damages that have been done to the accounts affected. In the meantime, the firm has taken proactive steps to prevent further attacks of this nature.

The steps include “rolling out additional company-wide training to guard against social engineering tactics to supplement the training employees receive during onboarding and ongoing phishing exercises throughout the year”. Twitter has started restoring affected accounts that were locked as a result of its ongoing remediation efforts.