Twitter admits hackers accessed DMs of lots of high-profile accounts

Last week’s hack of over 100 very high-profile Twitter accounts performed in truth expose the direct messages of many of those accounts, the company admitted today– including those of a chosen authorities in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders.

The attack saw numerous popular accounts of celebs and politicians taken over and tweeting a really obvious Bitcoin fraud that nevertheless seems to have actually netted a minimum of 6 figures. Twitter stated that a “collaborated social engineering attack” gave hackers “access to internal systems and tools.” Verified users were also briefly prevented from tweeting (a change some invited).

In tweets and an upgrade to its article on the “security event,” Twitter said that “for approximately 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox.” They are “actively working on interacting directly” with those accounts impacted.

Twitter had declined to state in the instant consequences of the attack whether DMs had actually been accessed by the hackers. Twitter’s messaging system is infamously not well encrypted but it was unclear whether the administrative tool supposedly used by the assaulters used access to inboxes.

Apparently whatever approach was used, it gave access to DMs some of the time, or maybe the hackers simply didn’t obtain themselves of the chance for the staying 94 accounts they took over. Twitter has formerly said that it has “no proof” that passwords were accessed by the hackers, and absolutely nothing in the update opposes that.

The company attempted to position a silver lining on this cloud, stating it had “no sign that any other former or current chosen authorities had their DMs accessed.” Considering the accounts of Barack Obama and Joe Biden were amongst those affected, that is technically great news.

This is almost certainly not the last we’ll hear from Twitter on this troubling security breach.