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A high-profile attack on Twitter may have been an inside job. According to a report from Motherboard, hackers are believed to have paid a Twitter staffer for assistance with the coordinated attack on a number of the social media platform’s high-profile celebrities.
Former President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk were among those targeted.
“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,” the official Twitter Support wrote in a statement.
“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 and will share more here as we have it.”
As for how the hack was conducted, the New York Post writes:
The accounts were taken over with an internal Twitter tool that shows various details about the identity and status of user accounts, such as whether the email address has been confirmed and whether the account has been suspended, according to screenshots Motherboard published.
Moving forward, Twitter says it will limit access to the tool in an effort to stop and prevent another attack.
