The notice, sent by the government's cybersecurity agency CERT-in as per the standard protocol in case of a mass-level hacking on any social media platform, sought to know if Indian user was part of those affected by the global scam, sources told IANS on Saturday.

 

The government has also asked about the vulnerabilities in its system that led to this attack and how Twitter is handling this.

 

Earlier in the day, Twitter released a detailed summary of the "social engineering attack" that hit at least 130 users earlier this week.

 

It said for 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account and send Tweets.

 

For up to eight of the Twitter accounts involved, the attackers took the additional step of downloading the accounts' information via the "Your Twitter Data" tool.

 

This is a tool that is meant to provide an account owner with a summary of his/her Twitter account details and activities.

 

"We are reaching out directly to any account owner where we know this to be true. None of the eight were verified accounts," said Twitter.

 

The company, however, did not specify which countries the 130 affected users belonged to.

 

The company said the attackers were not able to view previous account passwords, as those are not stored in plain text or available through the tools used in the attack.

 

"Attackers were able to view personal information, including email addresses and phone numbers, which are displayed to some users of our internal support tools," informed Twitter.

 

In cases where an account was taken over by the attacker, they may have been able to view additional information, Twitter said, adding that the forensic investigation of these activities was still going on.

 

The cybercriminals sent bogus tweets from high-profile people's accounts such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg and tech billionaires and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Apple and Uber, offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to a bitcoin address.

 

Celebrities like Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.