TWITTER ATTACK WAS WORK OF HACKER PALS
SAN FRACISCO: Hackers involved in the high-profile hijacking of Twitter accounts earlier this week were young pals with no links to state or organised crime, The New York Times reported on Friday. The attack started with a playful message between hackers on the platform Discord, a chat service popular with gamers.
“The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers,” The Times reported.
SAN FRANCISCO: Hackers involved in the high-profile hijacking of Twitter accounts earlier this week were young friends with no links to state or organised crime, The New York Times reported on Friday.
The attack, which Twitter and federal police in the US are investigating, started with a playful message between hackers on the platform Discord, a chat service popular with gamers, according to The NYT.
The newspaper said it has interviewed four people who participated in the hacking, who shared logs and screenshots backing up their accounts of what happened.
“The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers,” the daily reported.
“Instead, it was done by a group of young people - one of whom says he lives at home with his mother - who got to know one another because of their obsession with owning unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like @y or @6.”
Twitter says the hackers “manipulated” some of its employees to access accounts in the attack on the social media company, including those of former US president Barack Obama, Democratic presidential challenger Joe Biden and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. “Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers as part of the incident.”
It appeared to be a “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools”, Twitter explained.