What Happened on Twitter? Lawmakers Want Answers

(NewsBreakDaily.org) – On July 15, Twitter was sent into turmoil after a massive breach. Hackers seized control of many high-profile accounts like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Kanye West. They tweeted out messages trying to get followers to make Bitcoin contributions.

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.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

For a little while, they got away with it, too. In the early hours of the scam, the hackers were able to rake in $118,000.

When Twitter became aware of the hack, they disabled nearly all of the site’s verified users. For several hours Wednesday evening, users with blue checkmarks were unable to post. It not only affected people like President Trump, but also stopped the National Weather Service from tweeting out a tornado watch warning to parts of Illinois.

Wednesday’s massive breach has renewed lawmakers’ interest in oversight of social media. Hours after the hack Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to the social media site demanding answers. Among other things, Hawley wants to know if the attack threatened the security of the president’s account.

It wasn’t just Republicans alarmed with the Twitter hack. Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) also said the site has some serious questions to answer.

I don’t have any bitcoin to offer you but I do have grave concerns about what today’s hack of @Twitter means for the safety of our elections and other critical infrastructure from hostile actors. Now more than ever we have to strengthen our nation’s cyber security.

— John Garamendi (@RepGaramendi) July 15, 2020

So far, the company has not come forward with much of an explanation for how this could’ve happened. But they did tweet saying they were looking into the incident to see what other malicious activity the hackers may have been up to and what information they may have accessed. So at least there’s that.