Twitter’s Preliminary Investigation Reveals That a Backup of Eight Accounts’ Data Was Downloaded in Its Entirety ⇥ twitter.com
As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts. For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send Tweets.
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For up to eight of the Twitter accounts involved, the attackers took the additional step of downloading the account’s information through our “Your Twitter Data” tool. We are reaching out directly to any account owner where we know this to be true.
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There is a lot speculation about the identity of these 8 accounts. We will only disclose this to the impacted accounts, however to address some of the speculation: none of the eight were Verified accounts.
This is a doomsday scenario, and the hackers who have claimed credit for this attack and have spoken to news outlets have not mentioned it.
They said it was purely for Bitcoin and account takeovers and they let it get out of hand. Not sure why we’re taking their word for it.
None of the “hackers” who are speaking to the press appear to have actually been involved in the hacking side of what happened.
Though I’m inclined to agree with Collins that we should be very skeptical of the perpetrators’ apparent motivations, what we know so far is consistent with this being a purely financial scam.