The authorities in the US state of New York revealed the details of the largest hacking of Twitter last July.
The Ministry of Financial Services in New York said – in a statement, according to the “Alhurra” site – that a simple fraud, which was carried out over the phone, constituted the first and main step in the largest penetration of Twitter, which led to the acquisition of dozens of accounts belonging to high-profile pirates.
In details, the hackers responsible for the hack on July 15 contacted the Twitter employees and pretended to be the company’s IT workers.
The hackers succeeded in deceiving four Twitter employees and entering the internal tools of the social network, without using login credentials.
The ministry’s report pointed out that the main infiltrator committed his act despite the fact that he was no more than 17 years old.
The breach included important accounts belonging to personalities, including Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, in addition to accounts belonging to companies working in the field of cryptocurrency in New York.
Hackers were able to publish ads calling on account followers to send sums in the digital currency “Bitcoin” under deceptive promises to double them.
The report pointed out that the hackers succeeded in stealing a quantity of Bitcoin, whose value exceeds 118 thousand dollars.
According to the report, the incident “revealed a weak social media platform with more than 330 million monthly users and more than 186 million daily active users.”
The report emphasized that the breach did not involve “any high or advanced technologies that are often used in cyber attacks,” nor were any “malicious programs, exploits, or back doors used”.
The company had stated, in the results of its preliminary investigations, that 130 accounts were targeted, and that the attackers tweet through 45 of them, and were able to access messages from 36 accounts, and download data from seven accounts.
The company confirmed that it will take a set of measures against the background of recent hacking, including higher security settings for its systems to prevent any future breaches.
