Last week's security breach at Twitter, which resulted in attackers sending out tweets on behalf of several high-profile individuals, has focused attention once again on the challenges organizations face in protecting accounts with privileged access to internal systems and data.
In an update over the weekend, Twitter said its investigations so far showed that someone used social engineering to obtain credentials belonging to a small number of employees and then used those credentials to somehow bypass two-factor protections and access a key internal system.
The attackers used their access to target 130 Twitter accounts, including several belonging to high-profile individuals such as Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, former president Barack Obama, and business leaders including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.
With 45 of the accounts, the attackers were able to reset the passwords, log into the accounts, and send out tweets — all without alerting the account owners until after the fact. The tweets urged users to send Bitcoin to an address contained in the message within a specific period and get double the amount in return.
With eight of the compromised accounts, the attackers were additionally able to download detailed information about their Twitter profiles using the "Your Twitter Data" tool. The data that the attackers were able to access included usernames, email addresses, phone numbers, login history — including login IP and location information — the browsers and mobile devices associated with the accounts, blocked and muted accounts, and entire tweet history.
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