He added that he was proceeding to assess whether attackers could access the personal knowledge of the target accounts.
“While this ploy is financially motivated Array … believes that if these bad actors had another goal of using harsh voices to spread incorrect information and potentially interfere with our elections, disrupt the inventory market, or disrupt our foreign relations,” U.S. Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat, said in a statement.
Echoing a sentiment, Rep. Jim Jordan, the most sensible Republican of the House Judiciary Committee, asked what would happen if Twitter allowed an incident to occur on November 2, a day before the U.S. presidential election.
Jordan said he stayed on his Twitter account Thursday morning and said his confidence in the company’s operations had deteriorated.
Senate Trade Committee Chairman Republican Roger Wicker expressed similar considerations and asked Twitter Inc. to report to the committee until next week.
In a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Thursday, Wicker said that “you can’t overstate how troubling this incident is, either in its effects or in the obvious failure of Twitter’s internal controls to save it.” Wicker added that “it is not hard to believe that long-term attacks will be used to spread incorrect information or sow discord through high-profile narratives, especially those of world leaders.”
Twitter Inc. said hackers attacked workers with access to their internal systems and “used that access to take many highly visual accounts (including verified ones) and tweet on their behalf.”
Other high-level accounts that have been hacked are those of rapper Kanye West, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp. Bill Gates and the corporate accounts of Uber Technologies Inc and Apple Inc.
In general, it temporarily prevented many audited accounts from posting messages while investigating the breach.
Hacked accounts tweeted messages asking users to send bitcoins and their cash would double. Publicly, blockchain records show that obvious scammers earned more than $100,000 in cryptocurrencies.
Twitter shares fell more than 1% on Thursday afternoon.
CEO Dorsey said in a tweet Wednesday that it was a “difficult day” for everyone on Twitter and pledged to “as much as we can when we have a more complete understanding of what just happened.”
Dorsey’s assurances have dispelled Washington’s considerations of social media companies, whose policies have been analyzed by left-wing and right-wing critics.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner asked Twitter and law enforcement to investigate the matter, while the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. He said he contacted Twitter about the attack, according to a committee official who did not want to be identified.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley wrote a letter to Dorsey minutes after the hack and asked him about the possible theft of knowledge and the violation affected some users or the security of the platform as a whole.
Frank Pallone, a Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce who oversees a significant component of U.S. generation policy, said in a tweet that the company “must know how all those vital accounts were hacked.”
The New York State Department of Financial Services also spoke out, investigating piracy.