Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are demanding more details on Twitter’s massive hacking attack yesterday. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said in a statement Thursday that “Twitter must fully disclose what happened and what it is doing to ensure this never happens again.”
On Wednesday, Twitter accounts belonging to major companies like Apple and Uber and high-profile individuals like Vice President Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates were all compromised as part of a coordinated bitcoin scam. According to Twitter, the accounts were compromised by hackers who “successfully targeted” employees who had access to internal systems and tools that provided access to these accounts. The specifics are still unknown, but Twitter said late Wednesday evening that it was still investigating the details of the attack.
But some lawmakers aren’t content to let Twitter set the pace of the investigation. Shortly after the attack started, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking how the company plans to address and prevent large-scale breaches like Wednesday’s hacks.
“I am concerned that this event may represent not merely a coordinated set of separate hacking incidents but rather a successful attack on the security of Twitter itself,” Hawley said in his letter Wednesday. “A successful attack on your system’s servers represents a threat to all of your users’ privacy and data security.”
A longtime advocate for information security, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) called on Twitter to roll out encrypted direct messaging as a result.
“While it still isn’t clear if the hackers behind yesterday’s incident gained access to Twitter direct messages, this is a vulnerability that has lasted for far too long, and one that is not present in other, competing platforms,” Wyden said in a statement Thursday. “If hackers gained access to users’ DMs, this breach could have a breathtaking impact, for years to come.”
