Twitter admits hackers accessed celebrities' DMs

Twitter has admitted that the hack carried out last week that affected over 100 of high-profile accounts did manage to access direct messages.

The attack saw numerous popular accounts of celebrities and politicians taken over and tweeting a very obvious Bitcoin scam through a coordinated social engineering attack which gave the criminals access to internal systems and tools.

On 15 July, a number of Bitcoin-related accounts began tweeting what appeared to be a simple Bitcoin scam, promising to "give back" to the community by doubling any Bitcoin sent to their address.

The security breach hacked accounts including those of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Bill Gates.

In an update on the situation, Twitter said that “for up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox.” They are “actively working on communicating directly” with those accounts affected.

Twitter previously said that it has “no evidence” that passwords were accessed by the hackers.