Twitter has warned some of its users that they may be targets of state-sponsored attacks and that hackers were trying to obtain sensitive data from their accounts, reports Motherboard. 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 Twitter added that these attacks could have possibly originated from actors acting on behalf of governments, but declined to name which ones. In their notice to users, Twitter said that the attack only impacted usernames, IP address, email addresses, and phone numbers if a phone number was associated with the account. The company added that it found no evidence that accounts were compromised during its investigation. Motherboard also points out that the accounts which were targeted were those who were activists or associated with the Tor Project in some capacity. A few of the users were also part of the cyber security community. Twitter on its part directed these users to the Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to better protect their online identity. Tor is a free software that enables anonymous communication. It directs internet traffic through a free volunteer network concealing the user’s location. The routing is implemented by encrypting the data multiple times, including the destination IP address and sending it through randomly selected nodes of its network. Similar warnings from Google and Facebook Interestingly, Google had given a similar warning to users that there might be state-sponsored hackers compromising accounts way back in 2012. Google said that the…
