Phishing Messages Tricked Twilio Employees Into Divulging Sensitive Credentials

Twilio recently revealed that several employees were tricked by hackers, leading them to divulge personal, corporate-level logins. These logins allowed hackers to gain access to selected customer accounts. With over 150,000 corporate customers like Uber and Facebook, this breach had the potential to be a massive problem.

Twilio builds SMS and voice capabilities into various applications, allowing its customers to have improved communication with their audiences. Twilio also includes various safety measures, such as 2FA, or multi-factor authentication, into their applications.

Hackers sent SMS phishing messages to unsuspecting employees with authentic-looking messages claiming to be from the IT department within Twilio. The phrases used in the messages were internally used, and the URLs and logos all appeared authentic as well. Twilio has cooperated with U.S. carriers, hosting providers, and registrars to shut down all forms of communication connected to the attack.

The breach occurred on August 4, 2022, and allowed the hacker to enter Twilio's internal systems. The company has made no comment regarding how many customers were in the portion of the systems the hacker accessed. However, the company did list what information that it collects on each of its customers, including:

• IP addresses
• Address
• Payment information
• Occasional proof of identity

The company has not been able to identify the hacker yet, but they did confirm that several employees provided credentials after following legitimate-looking messages. Reports have also confirmed that other companies fell victim to the same hacker, including a large customer service provider, a U.S. internet company, and an IT outsourcing company. Details on those other attacks are slowly coming out, including new details on the connected attack on Cloudflare. 

In response to the attack, Twilio suspended access to each user with compromised credentials, increased security training for its employees, and started to contact any customer who may have been affected during the breach.