Taking note of hacking of high-profile Twitter accounts including those of former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Thursday said that they are diagnosing of exactly what happened.
"Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened," Dorsey said in a tweet.
Here's what we know so far:
1. These high-profile accounts posted similar tweets soliciting donations via Bitcoin to their verified profiles on Wednesday. "Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes," read Elon Musk now-deleted tweet.
2. Twitter then halted the ability for some accounts to send new tweets following a massive hacker attack on the social media website.
"You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address the incident," Twitter Support tweeted.
"We're continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience, " it added.
Later, Twitter said most accounts should be able to tweet again.
"Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go," Twitter Support tweeted.
"We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible," it said.
3. After an initial investigation, Twitter said that they have detected what they believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of their 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," Twitter Support tweeted.
"Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers," they added.
"We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely," the company said.
"Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates to come as our investigation continues," they added.
(With input from Agencies)
