Since the big hack that happened at Twitter last week, we’ve been learning more about how it happened. Twitter said that a small number of employees have internal access to change user settings and some other controls, allowing them to hand over controls to other people. But it turns out, over a thousand employees have that access.
This is making it hard for Twitter to defend that hack that happened last week.
Apparently, someone paid off a former Twitter employee, to gain internal access to the social network. The culprit even posted screenshots of the internal dashboard that employees use. So the fact that over a thousand people have access to this dashboard, is a bit worrisome.
Twitter and the FBI are still investigating this breach
The FBI announced that it was working on investigating this breach last week, and that Twitter is cooperating with them to find out what happened.
The hack allowed people to tweet from some verified accounts like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and even Michael Bloomberg. Some Twitter users that have many millions of followers and plenty of influence. The hackers in question had these accounts tweet out Bitcoin scams, and they got away with six figures, which is still pretty small compared to what they could have done with this level of a hack.
Twitter had stated that the culprits had “manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials” to login and turn over access to 45 accounts. It also noted that the culprits could read direct messages to and from 36 of these accounts, but did not say which ones.
This isn’t your normal hack
We hear about hacks happening all the time, with retailers, social networks and just about everything else. They are pretty normal, but this one is far from normal. It shows a pretty big flaw in Twitter’s system. The fact that someone was able to get employee login information for the backend of the site is pretty scary. And if they were able to get into verified user accounts, which are normally more secure, then that is very worrisome.
Twitter had been looking for a new security head and if anything, this hack shows that they really need one. And whoever is placed in charge of its security, has a big job in front of them. To fix this mess that Twitter is currently in. Surprisingly, their stock hasn’t taken a major hit yet.