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Hackers downloaded data from 8 accounts in the high-profile Twitter hack.

An Australian hacker is facing more than two years in prison after stealing more than $300K in XRP tokens in January 2018.
An Australian hacker is facing more than two years in prison after stealing more than $300K in XRP tokens in January 2018.

The social media giant Twitter said late Friday that hackers who hijacked the accounts of high-profile users, including former US President Barack Obama and Microsoft founder Bill Gates and many others, to tweet out a bitcoin scam this week also downloaded the data from up to eight accounts. Downloading data from a Twitter user means downloading his direct messages, photos, videos, address books, and other information. Hackers had compromised 130 accounts and solicited bitcoins from their followers. Over $100,000 in bitcoins were transferred to that bitcoin address within a few minutes.

“Data was not downloaded from the verified accounts.”

The social media giant Twitter confirmed that the hackers who had compromised accounts of many famous people, including the former US president Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Elon Musk, and many others, had also downloaded data of eight users. However, the eight accounts that hackers had downloaded data from were unverified accounts. Twitter did not disclose the identities of those eight accounts. Twitter Support tweeted that they would only disclose this to the impacted accounts. However, to address some of the speculations: none of the eight were Verified accounts, it added.

The Twitter hack was a result of targeted social engineering.

The microblogging platform Twitter suffered a major hack earlier this week, compromising data of some of the most high profile people in the world. The social media company in a statement said that they detected what is believed to be “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of the employees with access to internal systems and tools.” Hackers managed to change passwords of 45 accounts and access information, including email addresses and phone numbers. Twitter had suspended all verified accounts on the platform from tweeting for a while after the hack. The social media platform is currently investigating the hack that compromised the information of people like Joe Bide, who is currently running for the US President.

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