FBI Leads Response to Hack

Twitter blames a coordinated attack on its employees for the site's biggest hack yet, and the FBI is charged with getting to the bottom of it. New York launched its own investigation, the Washington Post reports, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo calling the breach especially concerning with elections on the horizon. The accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and others were affected Wednesday in what appears to have been a cryptocurrency scam. "This was not a hack of Biden's campaign," an FBI official said. "Or of Elon Musk. This was all about a fraud scheme and not about trying to turn the political winds in a certain direction." The attackers used a Twitter employee's access, the official said, though there are suggestions that an employee was in on it.

Given the possibility of the political chaos that false tweets could cause, cybersecurity experts called it fortunate that the hackers were just interested in money. "We're looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted," the company said, per CNN, "or information they may have accessed." Cuomo said Thursday that this sort of hack could affect the elections, and Washington lawmakers called for more information about it. Twitter has not provided many details so far. All sorts of information is at risk, a security firm said. "Confidential employee and customer data, legal documents, and intellectual property are being exposed to unwanted parties on a daily basis," a Check Point post said. (More Twitter stories.)