On Thursday, House Oversight Committee Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) requested information from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about the hacking that occurred the night prior, which hit several large accounts, including of accounts of Joe Biden, Kanye West, Elon Musk and others. The hackers caused these accounts to send tweets offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to a bitcoin address.
Afterward, Twitter said it detected a “coordinated social engineering attack.”
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
Twitter then temporarily blocked tweeting from all verified (blue-check) accounts for a few hours while the company investigated the hack.
In the letter, which you can read in full here, Ranking Member Comer warned that “[B]reaches similar to yesterday’s have the potential to jeopardize national and economic security and disrupt the lives of millions of Americans.” Comer requested a briefing from Twitter no later than July 24th, which should include answers to these questions:
1) How many Twitter employees were targeted in the social engineering attack, and what disciplinary action has resulted?
2) What training is in place for Twitter employees to avoid social engineering attacks, and why did it fail?
3) Was the hacking done by a foreign adversary or a private entity?
4) Was your personal Twitter account among those breached? Does your personal account have an added layer of security that other accounts do not?
5) Were any non-verified Twitter accounts subject to the breach?
6) How quickly did Twitter alert the FBI to the breach?
7) How many Twitter accounts were subject to the breach, and what steps are in place to ensure the prevention of a system-wide breach?
8) What steps has Twitter taken to ensure a similar breach never occurs again?
Maybe Twitter could’ve prevented this had they not been so busy “fact-checking” and censoring conservatives.
