United States Senator Josh Hawley has urged Twitter to be more open and work with federal law enforcement agencies to unravel the circumstances surrounding a major breach of accounts of technology moguls, politicians, celebrities, and major companies on its platform.
Hawley (R-Missouri) conveyed this in a letter dated Wednesday, June 15, and addressed to Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey.
In an audacious attack that took the world by storm, ex-President Barack Obama, ex-Vice President Joe Biden, world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, billionaire techpreneur Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and husband Kanye West and other top voices had their account used to solicit digital currency on Wednesday. Major companies like Apple and Uber were also not spared. The posts were deleted shortly after.
Hawley, one of Twitter’s biggest critics in Congress, said, “I am concerned that this event may represent not merely a coordinated set of separate hacking incidents but rather a successful attack on the security of Twitter itself.
“As you know, millions of your users rely on your service not just to tweet publicly but also to communicate privately through your direct message service.
“A successful attack on your system’s servers represents a threat to all of your users’ privacy and data security.”
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He urged the company to reach out “immediately” to the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and take necessary actions to prevent the breach from escalating.
After this, he said, the company must also answer some fundamental questions, including whether the breach represents a breach of users’ own account security or Twitter’s systems.
Meanwhile, Twitter said it locked down the affected accounts as soon as it became aware of the hijacking, removed the tweets posted by the “attackers” and prevented all verified accounts from publishing messages altogether.
The company explained, “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.
“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.”
“Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing,” the company added.