Indian government has issued notice to social media giant Twitter asking the microblogging website to share full details of the recent unprecedented hacking of global high-profile users accounts including information on Indian users affected by the hack and the data impacted, according to news agency PTI.
The agency quoted its sources to claim that the Indian government’s cyber security agency CERT or Computer Emergency Response Team has contacted Twitter for information on the sensational incident that has raised serious questions on the security of data on extremely popular social media platform and triggered investigations by the federal police of the United States.
CERT is the nodal national agency for responding to computer security incidents.
In a massive hacking incident, around 130 high-profile accounts including those of democrat leader and US presidential nominee Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama, entrepreneur Elon Musk, philanthropist and business magnate Bill Gates and rapper Kanye West were compromised earlier this week.
The New York Times has, however, reported that the hackers were young men and had no links to state or organized crime. The paper’s claim is based on interviews conducted with four hackers, involved in the incident, who shared logs and screenshots to back up their accounts of the sensational security breach.
The paper claimed the attacks were not the handiwork of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group.
Twitter, which is conducting a parallel investigation into the incident, had earlier tweeted to say that approximately 130 accounts were targeted and for around 45 of these accounts, the hackers were able to gain control and then send Tweets.
Fake posts were sent from several of these accounts including those belonging to Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Barack Obama on Wednesday asking people to send virtual currency bitcoin into email accounts mentioned by the hackers.
These fraudulent posts gave 30 minutes for people to send $1,000 in cryptocurrency bitcoin, promising they would receive twice as much in return.
More than $100,000 worth of bitcoin was sent to email addresses mentioned in the tweets, according to Blockchain.com, which monitors crypto transactions.
Twitter said 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.
The NY Times report claims a hacker with the name Kirk initiated the scheme with and he was the one with access to Twitter accounts.
The young hackers told the paper that they stopped serving as middlemen for Kirk when he started targeting high-profile accounts.
Twitter said that a small number of its employees’ credentials were hacked to gain access to the company’s internal systems through two-factor protections enabling them to log in, send tweets and reset the password for some accounts.
It also confirmed that the hackers downloaded account information for eight accounts using “Your Twitter Data” tool.
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