Twitter says the hackers who carried out the hijacking of many of the platform’s most prominent accounts used “social engineering” to manipulate employees of the media company into divulging confidential information.
A raft of verified accounts fell victim to the massive security breach, including those of Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and Barack Obama. “In this context, social engineering is the intentional manipulation of people into performing certain actions and divulging confidential information,” Twitter explained.
The tech company said on Saturday that the unidentified attackers gained access to tools that are available only to its internal support teams and targeted 130 accounts. They successfully reset the passwords of 45 of them and were able to tweet from those accounts.
In the case of up to eight of the accounts, the hackers were able to download account information, but Twitter says none of these were verified accounts.
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