07/18/2020 - 9:20
- Clarín.com
- Technology
Hackers who organized an attack on Twitter accounts of high-profile accounts such as those of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and celebrities, "successfully manipulated a small number of employees" of the social network, acknowledged the company on Saturday.
Twitter said that in total the hackers were targeting 130 accounts and managed to access 45 thanks to "the use of tools only accessible to internal support teams ," the company explained in a blog post.
Those affected by the attack include politicians, such as the Democratic Party's American presidential candidate, Joe Biden, former United States President Barack Obama, and also big businessmen such as Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; Elon Musk, head of Tesla; and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.
Hackers sent messages from these accounts to which they accessed to encourage Twitter users to donate cryptocurrencies bitcoins with the promise of getting double that amount.
According to specialized sites that record bitcoin exchanges, even though the identity of the recipients cannot be known, about $ 100,000 was sent.
Twitter said on Saturday that hackers also downloaded data from eight of these accounts that can only be accessed by their owner.
Former US President Barack Obama, along with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, two of the hacked. (EFE)
The social network also explained that thanks to the tools that hackers had accessed, they circumvented the double authentication barrier, a process that provides more security than the password.
This attack, investigated by the FBI, sparked a debate about the security of social networks a few months before the November presidential elections in the United States, also about the consequences that it would have if hackers managed to access the account of the American president, Donald Trump, who often conducts his diplomacy on Twitter, where he has 83.5 million subscribers.