A successful attack on system servers poses a threat to user privacy, said Josh Hawley.
Washington DC:
US Senator Josh Hawley urged Twitter to cooperate with federal law enforcement and take steps to secure the site before cyber crimes hack into the accounts of tech moguls, politicians, celebrities and Big companies in an apparent Bitcoin scam are not growing.
In a letter to Twitter on Wednesday, Hawley, who was one of the fiercest critics of the tech industry at Capitol Hill, said the social media giant should work with the FBI and the Department of Justice after pirates took over the accounts of celebrities, democratic politicians. and billionaires, including former President Barack Obama, businessman Bill Gates, rapper Kanye West and former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as accounts from tech companies like Apple and Uber.
“I am concerned that this event is not just a coordinated set of separate hacking incidents, but rather a successful attack on Twitter security,” wrote Hawley to company CEO Jack Dorsey.
“As you know, millions of your users rely on your service not only to tweet publicly but also to communicate privately through your direct messaging service,” he said.
“A successful attack on your system’s servers poses a threat to the privacy and security of all your users’ data,” the letter said.
All the fake tweets asked people to send cryptocurrency to the same bitcoin address. The tweets were deleted throughout the afternoon, shortly after their publication.
There have been hackings of high-level individual accounts on Twitter before, including Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey last year. But the widespread nature of the attack suggested unusually broad access to internal controls, according to the Washington Post.
While it is not clear how the attacks started or why they lasted for hours, some cybersecurity experts speculated that someone could have accessed Twitter’s internal controls that allowed them to take over and to publish on accounts.
Hawley also sent a list of questions asking Twitter about its security measures and seeking transparency on who exactly was targeted.
President Donald Trump, a prolific Twitter user and critic of social media companies, has yet to weigh in, but his campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh compared Biden’s tax scam in a sarcastic tweet .
Meanwhile, the attack also partially shut down the network. Twitter said in a tweet on Wednesday afternoon that some users were unable to tweet while it was handling the incident. Users with the checkmark indicating that their accounts have been verified by Twitter indicated that they were unable to tweet.
Twitter resumed letting verified accounts tweet Wednesday evening, but warned that “functionality can come and go” as it worked on a fix to the breach. Later that same night, Dorsey tweeted that the company “would diagnose and share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of what happened.” He called it a “tough day” on Twitter.
The social media giant said in a later tweet that “it has detected a coordinated attack by people who have successfully targeted some of our employees who have access to internal systems and tools.” The hackers used this access to take over the accounts.
