Click to Skip Ad
Closing in...

Twitter begins sending out alerts to victims of state-sponsored attacks

Published Dec 14th, 2015 10:55PM EST
Twitter State-Sponsored Attacks
Image: Twitter

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

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.

DON’T MISS: New smartphone with a battery that lasts up to 15 days launches next month

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:

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.

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.