Twitter employees reportedly created fake support requests to access personal data of celebrities

A couple of weeks back Twitter came under a massive attack that compromised accounts of high profile people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and former President Barak Obama. The attackers ran a Bitcoin financial scam and were able to get away with about $120,000 in Bitcoins.

Now Bloomberg has reported that around 1,500 Twitter employees and contractors accessed personal information of celebrities by creating fake support tickets. According to the report, employees accessed IP addresses of celebrities to get their approximate location. Moreover, snooping of accounts became such a regular occurrence that Twitter’s security team couldn’t keep up.

Post this some were caught and then fired while others found an intelligent way of hiding it. They started creating bogus support tickets claiming there was something wrong with the account and then assigned those tickets to themselves to use as an excuse to snoop. These issues were repeatedly raised with CEO Jack Dorsey and the board but were ignore or pushed to the back burner. Former employees suggested that Twitter was more interested in developing new consumer tools than it was to increase security.

A Twitter spokesperson told Bloomberg that it conducts rigorous training “in line with our commitment to protecting the privacy and security of the people we serve.” She also said that access comes with “extensive security training and managerial oversight.”