Twitter Alerts Users Of Possible State-Sponsored Attacks

Twitter has issued a warning to some users about state-sponsored actors targeting their account to obtain information such as email addresses, IP addresses and phone numbers.

“As a precaution, we are alerting you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors”, Twitter said in the warning email. “We believe that these actors (possibly associated with a government) may have been trying to obtain information such as email addresses, IP addresses and/or phone numbers”.

Companies like Google and Facebook already have warning systems to guard users against government-sponsored attacks. According to FT, state-sponsored hackers are the most sophisticated and well-resourced hackers, often using cyber attacks to conduct espionage or steal intellectual property.

As most Twitter posts are already public, FT suspects that the hackers may have been more interested in obtaining personal data such phone numbers, or finding a way to tweet through hijacked accounts. Interestingly, some of the users who received the warning email were cryptographers, security researchers, activists or journalists.

“At this time, we have no evidence they obtained your account information, but we’re actively investigating this matter…It’s possible your account may not have been an intended target of the suspected activity, but we wanted to alert you as soon as possible”, the email read.