Twitter

Twitter Breach Exposes One of Tech's Biggest Threats: Its Own Employees

Scam-filled messages were sent from some of the most-followed people on the platform

In this photo illustration the Twitter icon is seen displayed on smartphone screen in this illustration photo taken in Poland on February 19, 2020.
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Cybersecurity professionals broadly agree on a central problem: computers and code have clear fixes, but humans do not.

Twitter provided perhaps the most high-profile example of this challenge when its security was breached Wednesday, allowing for scam-filled messages to be sent from some of the most-followed people on the platform, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, and Elon Musk.

Specifics of how the attack happened are still unconfirmed, but Twitter announced Wednesday night it suspected “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”

For more on this story, go to NBC News.

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