BITCOIN BOUNTY
Posing as celebrities and the wealthy, the hackers asked followers to send the digital currency bitcoin to a series of addresses. By evening, 400 bitcoin transfers were made worth a combined $120,000. Half of the victims had funds in U.S. bitcoin exchanges, a quarter in Europe and a quarter in Asia, according to forensics company Elliptic.
Those transfers left history that could help investigators identify the perpetrators of the hack. The financial damage may be limited because multiple exchanges blocked other payments after their own Twitter accounts were targeted.
The damage to Twitter's reputation may be more serious. Most troubling to some was how long the company took to stop the bad tweets.
"Twitter's response to this hack was astonishing. It's the middle of the day in San Francisco, and it takes them five hours to get a handle on the incident," said Dan Guido, CEO of security company Trail of Bits.
An even worse scenario was that the bitcoin fraud was a distraction for more serious hacking, such as harvesting the direct messages of the account holders.
Twitter said it was not yet certain what the hackers may have done beyond sending the bitcoin messages.
"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," the company said.
Mass compromises of Twitter accounts via theft of employee credentials or problems with third-party applications that many users employ have occured before.
Wednesday's hack was the worst to date. Several users with two-factor authentication - a security procedure that helps prevent break-in attempts - said they were powerless to stop it.
"If the hackers do have access to the backend of Twitter, or direct database access, there is nothing potentially stopping them from pilfering data in addition to using this tweet-scam as a distraction," said Michael Borohovski, director of software engineering at security company Synopsys.
