Jul 31, 2020

Twitter hack: Staff tricked by phone spear-phishing scam

The unprecedented hacking of celebrity Twitter accounts this month was caused by human error and a spear-phishing attack on Twitter employees, the company has confirmed. Twitter isn't clarifying whether or not their employees were duped by an email or a phone call. The criminals obtained the phone numbers of a handful of Twitter staff and, by using friendly persuasion and trickery, got them to hand over usernames and passwords that gave them an initial foothold into the internal system. Hacker to Twitter employee: "Hi, I'm new to the department and I've locked myself out of the Twitter internal portal, can you do me a huge favour and give me the login again?". Twitter did not state whether the attack involved voice calls, despite a previous report from Bloomberg stating that at least one Twitter employee was contacted by attackers through a phone call.

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