Prominent US figures have been targeted by hackers on Twitter in what the company calls a ‘disruptive’ and ‘socially engineered’ attack.
The official accounts of leading politicians and celebrities were hacked to request donations to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
In a series of tweets, Twitter stated: “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.
“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed.
“Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
“We also limited functionality for a much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts (even those with no evidence of being compromised), while we continue to fully investigate this.
“This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
Click below to share this article