The Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals were compromised on Wednesday in one of the most widespread and confounding breaches the platform has ever seen, all in service of promoting a bitcoin scam that earned its creators nearly $120,000.
Multiple law enforcement investigations, including one from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are now actively probing the situation over far a deeper concern: that the exploited vulnerability in Twitter’s systems — a result it seems of mid-level employees having powerful access to site-wide admin tools that can fall into the wrong hands — has exposed serious security risks for the platform’s most powerful users. Lawmakers are hounding Twitter for more transparency around the incident, and it seems likely the attack will have longstanding consequences not just for Twitter’s own internal tools and security, but for the broaden cybersecurity industry and every high-profile Twitter user on the platform, too.
We still don’t know how exactly the hack happened or even to what extent Twitter’s own systems were compromised. But following the unprecedented hacks of accounts including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple, Twitter took the drastic step of blocking new tweets from every verified user, compromised or no, as well as locking all compromised accounts.