Twitter blames ‘coordinated social engineering attack’ for hacking

Twitter said Wednesday that several prominent accounts fell victim to a “coordinated social engineering attack,” after several prominent users had their accounts compromised and Twitter decided to lock many users’ accounts.

The cyberattack affected many different users, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden, former President Barack Obama, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, among other high-visibility accounts.

Twitter said its investigation is ongoing and it does not yet fully know what other malicious activity the attackers may have engaged in or what data may have been stolen.

“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” Twitter said via its @TwitterSupport account. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf.”

Twitter said it has continued to keep compromised accounts locked and will restore access only after ensuring it can do so securely.

Accounts for Mr. Biden and Mr. Gates showed messages on Wednesday evening about the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and instructed Twitter users to send $1,000 and the prominent figures would respond by sending $2,000 back, according to messages posted on the accounts that no longer appear on Twitter’s platform.

Following the cyberintrusions, Twitter said it decided to lock the functionality of all verified accounts to determine the source of the problem. Twitter said late on Wednesday night that most accounts had their functionality restored.

“Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing,” Twitter said via @TwitterSupport. “More updates to come as our investigation continues.”

This is not the first time Twitter has struggled to protect users’ information. Twitter previously agreed to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission charges that “serious lapses in the company’s data security allowed hackers to obtain unauthorized administrative control of Twitter…and the ability to send out phony tweets from any account including those belonging to then-President-elect Barack Obama and Fox News, among others,” according to an FTC press release from 2010.