Within the past week, Twitter has begun alerting users to attacks from state-sponsored hackers attempting to lift sensitive information from their accounts. This is a first for the popular social media network, although Facebook and Google had already implemented similar alert systems for their users.
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According to the notice (which was received by multiple organizations), only a “small group of accounts” were targeted, and there was no evidence that any data had been stolen in the process.
Reuters reports that Winnipeg-based nonprofit Coldhak was one of the organizations under fire from the state-sponsored hackers. In the message the organization received, Twitter wrote that the actors “may have been trying to obtain information such as email address, IP addresses, and/or phone numbers.”
Twitter didn’t have any more information to share with the owners of the accounts affected by the supposed attack, but the social media company is “actively investigating this matter” in the meantime.
Coldhak posted a tweet with the full message from Twitter on Friday:
We received a warning from @twitter today stating we may be "targeted by state-sponsored actors" pic.twitter.com/oZm83eVFC5
— coldhak (@coldhakca) December 11, 2015
Although this is certainly a step in the right direction for Twitter, the proposed solution rings a bit false. In the message, Twitter suggests that the victims of the attack should visit the Tor Project, but as The Guardian notes, Twitter users who use the Tor browser have frequently been blocked from the service. This might be the impetus the company needs to ensure that Tor users can access the site more easily in the future.
