
Social media giant Twitter on Friday explained how Bitcoin scammers hijacked celebrity accounts ofBarack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Kim Kardashiantwo weeks ago.
The tech firm revealed thathackers responsible for therecent high-profile breach usedaphone to fool the social media company's employees into giving them access.
They used the technique of "spear-phishing" to attack, whichis a practice of sending emails ostensibly from a known or trusted sender in order to induce targeted individuals to reveal confidential information.
Hackers had accessedTwitter's internal systems on July 15 to hijack some of the platform's top voices including USpresidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former USPresident Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk and used them to solicit digital currency.
Publicly available blockchain records show the apparent scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
The hackers targeted 130 accounts. They managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inboxes of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven. Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has said his inbox was among those accessed.
Twitter didn't provide any more information about how the attack was carried out, saying it would provide a more detailed report later, given the ongoing law enforcement investigation. The company has previously said the incident was a coordinated social engineering attackthat targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools.