Two people claiming to be responsible for Wednesday’s massive Twitter hacking said they paid a Twitter employee to help them with the breach.
“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Vice News.
The hackers, as well as the screenshots Vice obtained, claim to show that the accounts were taken over using an internal tool at Twitter. One of the screenshots shows a page for Binance, an account that was hacked on Wednesday. What is pictured appears to be the tool used to suspend an account or change its information.
Vice reported that it received other similar screenshots of the tool and that photos of the tool which have circulated on Twitter have been deleted and the accounts responsible for posting them blocked.
Twitter originally told the outlet that they were not sure whether the hacking took place because an employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to the tool. After the story was published, Twitter posted on its support account, “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.”
This suggests that Twitter believes the hack happened through an unintentional mistake by one of its employees. Social engineering can include tactics such as sending a spam email with a malicious link.
Some of the platform’s most-followed accounts were hijacked during the incident, including those of former President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Apple, and Uber. The accounts were used to post a Bitcoin scam. In order to regain control of the platform, Twitter took away the ability of verified accounts to tweet for a couple of hours.
[Opinion: Shut down Twitter now]
