Twitter had stepped up its search for a chief information security officer in recent weeks, two people familiar with the effort told Reuters, before the breach of high-profile accounts on Wednesday raised alarms about the platform’s security.
Twitter had stepped up its search for a chief information security officer in recent weeks, two people familiar with the effort told Reuters, before the breach of high-profile accounts on Wednesday raised alarms about the platform’s security. The FBI’s San Francisco division is leading an inquiry into the Twitter hacking, it said in a statement, as more Washington lawmakers called for an accounting of how it happened.
The law enforcement agency said hackers committed cryptocurrency fraud after they seized control of the Twitter accounts of celebrities and political figures including Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Elon Musk.
A day after the breach, it was not clear if the hackers were able to see private messages sent by account holders, although Twitter said it had no evidence that attackers had been able to access passwords.
The company said in a statement that it was continuing to lock accounts that had changed passwords in the past month, but said „we believe only a small subset of these locked accounts were compromised.“ Twitter declined to comment on the job search.
In a sign of how much the attack unnerved US lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans showed rare bipartisan agreement that Twitter must better explain how the security lapse happened and what it was doing to prevent future attacks.
„This hack bodes ill for November balloting,“ US Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said in a statement scolding Twitter for „its repeated security lapses and failure to safeguard accounts.
