Joseph Cox, Motherboard:

A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts.

And:

“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider. Motherboard granted the sources anonymity to speak candidly about a security incident. A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that the company is still investigating whether the employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to the tool.

And:

After a wave of account takeovers, screenshots of an internal Twitter user administration tool are being shared in the hacking underground.

And this response from Twitter:

After the publication of this piece, Twitter said in a tweet that “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”

Were the employees duped by social engineering? Or was there complicity here, was a Twitter insider paid, as indicated by the article.

Also, there is some question as to whether the bitcoin scam was the hackers’ endgame. Or if access to the accounts opened a door that could be exploited later.

Beyond alarming.