Twitter says hackers targeted 130 accounts this week as high-profile handles were hacked

Twitter Inc on July 16 informed that about 130 accounts were hacked during this week's cyberattack that also targeted some high-profile handles on the platform. Twitter said that for a small subset of the accounts targeted, the attackers were able to gain control of the handles and then send tweets from those accounts. The micro-blogging platform said that it is working with the impacted owners and will continue to do so for the next several days. The company said that it is continuing to assess whether non-public data related to these accounts were compromised in the attack. 

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"We have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing. We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can. For all accounts, downloading Your Twitter Data is still disabled while we continue this investigation," the company said in a series of tweets issued on July 17. According to reports, the FBI is leading an inquiry into the matter as to who was behind the attacks.

Read: Experts Say Twitter Breach Troubling, Undermines Trust

On July 15, high-profile celebrities such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Joe Biden and many others, all of whom have verified profiles were targeted by Bitcoin scammers. The hackers tweeted spam messages from these profiles and asked their followers to send money to a specified Bitcoin wallet. This was one of the worst security breaches in the history of social media.

Read: Twitter Hack: Obama, Elon Musk, Apple & Others Hit In Bitcoin Scam; Here's All We Know

'Tough day'

Following the attack, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had posted, "Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened. Love(Blue emoji) to our teammates working hard to make this right."

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