Twitter confirms that 130 accounts were targeted in high-profile hack

(Reuters) – Twitter said late on Thursday that hackers targeted about 130 accounts during the cyberattack this week, an incident in which profiles of many prominent personalities and organizations were compromised.

Hackers had accessed Twitter’s internal systems to hijack some of the platform’s top voices, including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former U.S. President Barack Obama, and billionaire Elon Musk, and used them to solicit digital currency.

In its latest statement, Twitter said the hackers were able to gain control of a “small subset” of the targeted accounts and send tweets from them.

The company added that it was continuing to assess whether the attackers were able to access private data of the targeted accounts.

High-profile accounts that were hacked included rapper Kanye West, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, and the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple.

Twitter reiterated that it was working with impacted account owners.

The FBI’s San Francisco division is leading an inquiry into the hack, with many Washington lawmakers also calling for an accounting of how it happened.

The law enforcement agency said cyberattackers committed cryptocurrency fraud in the incident. Publicly available blockchain records show the apparent scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

“We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can,” Twitter added in its statement.

(Reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru, editing by Shailesh Kuber.)