There is a lot speculation about the identity of these 8 accounts. We will only disclose this to the impacted accounts, however to address some of the speculation: none of the eight were Verified accounts.
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The attack on July 15, 2020, targeted a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack. This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems.
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130 total accounts targeted by attackers
By obtaining employee credentials, they were able to target specific employees who had access to our account support tools. They then targeted 130 Twitter accounts - Tweeting from 45, accessing the DM inbox of 36, and downloading the Twitter Data of 7.
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While these tools, controls, and processes are constantly being updated and improved, we are taking a hard look at how we can make them even more sophisticated.
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We’ve significantly limited access to our internal tools and systems. Until we can safely resume normal operations, our response times to some support needs and reports will be slower. Thank you for your patience as we work through this.
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We’re accelerating several of our pre-existing security workstreams and improvements to our tools. We are also improving our methods for detecting and preventing inappropriate access to our internal systems and prioritizing security work across many of our teams.
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This was a striking reminder of how important each person on our team is in protecting our service. We take that responsibility seriously and everyone at Twitter is committed to keeping your information safe.
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We’ll continue to share updates and precautionary steps we take so that others can learn from this, too. We recognize the trust you place in us, and are committing to earning it by continued open, honest and timely updates anytime an incident like this happens.
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We previously turned off the download Your Twitter Data feature for all accounts as a precaution. We’ve turned it back on for everyone, so you can now download your Twitter archive from your account settings. https://cards.twitter.com/cards/an434/95w78 …
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