Science/Tech

Twitter Warned Users of a Potential Hacking Attack by the ‘State Sponsored Actors’

By Kanika Gupta | Update Date: Dec 15, 2015 10:58 AM EST

Twitter recently warned a group of users that it believes have been hacked by the "state sponsored actors", reported The Guardian. There have been about 30 account users who were contacted by the Social Media team saying that the hackers may be attempting to get personal information, email addresses, phone numbers and other sensitive information by hacking into their Twitter accounts. Most of these users are apparently from or associated with the IT security industry. Twitter in its email also said that they have "no evidence" to prove that the hackers got the details they were after, said Quartz.

The email warning said, "As a precaution, we are alerting you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors. We believe that these actors (possibly associated with a government) may have been trying to obtain information such as email addresses, IP addresses, and/or phone numbers." It added, "At this time, we have no evidence they obtained you account information, but we're actively investigating this matter. We wish we had more we could share, but we don't have any additional information at this time," reports The Guardian.

Twitter is following the footsteps of Facebook and Google in pre-warning the potential users of state-sponsored hacking. Google was the first one to introduce these warnings back in 2012 while Facebook started it in October this year. However, none of these companies have provided details about how they distinguish state-sponsored hackings from the conventional attacks. The companies reason that they need to keep their methods secret so that they can keep the hackers a step behind, always. Even though Twitter did not respond for the request for a comment, they did confirm that the notices have been sent to the users under potential attack, said Washington Post.

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