Last week, Twitter was the victim of a spear phishing attack that led to hundreds of celebrity accounts hacked to request Bitcoin donations. The incident has highlighted the need for CISOs to take action to protect employees from such attacks and ensure internal processes are not abused by hackers.

The attack led to the tweets from the likes of Bill Gates that had variations of this: “Everyone is asking me to give back. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.” The tweet posted details of a Bitcoin wallet to send money to. Within hours, at least 375 transactions were made totalling over $120,000.

“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” said Twitter in a tweet.