Twitter Sends Out Suspicious Emails
Twitter Caused a Bit of Panic When It Accidentally Sent Emails Asking its Users to Confirm Their Accounts.
On Thursday Night, Twitter caused panic when it accidentally sent some emails in which it was asking users to confirm their accounts. The users felt that the emails looked suspicious and reminded them of the way in which phishing attacks are created.
Phishing is a malicious technique used by cybercriminals to gather sensitive information (credit card data, usernames and passwords, etc.) from users. The attackers pretend to be a trustworthy entity to bait the victims into trusting them and revealing their confidential data. The data gathered through phishing can be used for financial theft, identity theft, to gain unauthorized access to the victim’s accounts or to accounts they have access to, to blackmail the victim and more.
These emails began rolling out around 10 PM EST, and used the subject line “Confirm your Twitter account” whilst also including a button labeled “Confirm Now“.
The emails and links contained in them looked legitimate, but because the users were not expecting to receive those emails, they immediately became suspicious of them being part of a phishing attack.
The journalists from BleepingComputer received the emails as well and started questioning their validity, but as they weren’t the only ones that had suspicions of the emails, more users took to Twitter to express their concerns.
Twitter better be about to verify me or something because I’ve had the same Twitter account with the same email since 2010 talking about “welcome to Twitter” lmao pic.twitter.com/I1NDV0Ze4J
— POSTCARD (@postcardraps) April 23, 2021
Ever get a random email from Twitter 12 years after setting up your account asking to confirm your email? pic.twitter.com/TiWccmgbtJ
— David Firth (Salad Fingers) (@DAVID_FIRTH) April 23, 2021
Got an email from @Twitter asking me to “confirm my account” (that I’ve had for like, a decade), but I have a sneaky feeling this is not aaaaaactually from Twitter pic.twitter.com/wYuohYZxP6
— Andrea Kuszewski 🧠 (@AndreaKuszewski) April 23, 2021
It seems like the confirmation emails were not a phishing attack, the emails were just an accident, as confirmed by the Twitter Support account.
Some of you may have recently received an email to “confirm your Twitter account” that you weren’t expecting. These were sent by mistake and we’re sorry it happened. If you received one of these emails, you don’t need to confirm your account and you can disregard the message.
It’s safe to say that if you have the Twitter confirmation email unopened in your inbox, you can just ignore the message and simply delete it.