"Hackers Breached Twitter Accounts by Targeting Employees by Phone"

In a new update, Twitter clarifies some of the events around a July 15 breach in which attackers took over accounts belonging to former president Barack Obama, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, and rapper Kanye West to solicit bitcoin. The scammers targeted 130 accounts, tweeted from 45 accounts, accessed the direct messages of 36 of the accounts, and downloaded Twitter data of about seven users.  Twitter has discovered that the attackers targeted a small number of Twitter employees through a phone spear phishing attack.  Not all the affected employees had access to account management tools, the company said, but hackers used their credentials to gather information about Twitter’s internal processes. The adversaries then used that reconnaissance data to inform attacks on Twitter personnel with deeper access.

CyberScoop reports: "Hackers Breached Twitter Accounts by Targeting Employees by Phone"