Hackers Hacked Into Prominent Twitter Accounts – Bitcoin Scam
Accounts on Twitter belonging to Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and Apple, among other verified handles, were compromised on Wednesday and posted tweets that seemed to promote and encourage a cryptocurrency scam.
US Twitter accounts hacked in Bitcoin scam!
The above stated accounts, along with those of former President Barack Obama, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg, posted very similar tweets asking for donations via Bitcoin to their verified profiles on Wednesday.
Bill Gates tweet was constructed as a Social responsibility, stating that “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,”, with a promise to double all payments to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.
In a tweet to address what had happened, Twitter’s support account tweeted that ; “We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.”
A little more than an hour after the attack began, Twitter made a move to prevent the holders of verified accounts from tweeting. The support account tweeted that “You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.” A test however, showed that non-verified accounts could still tweet.
The sheer number of prominent accounts impacted is what has made this arguably the biggest security incident in Twitter’s history. A hack like this is particularly alarming not just because of any financial scam that can be run, but because so many world leaders use Twitter, and most of them, like President Donald Trump, use it to announce major policy decisions. A hack that took over an account belonging to one of those leaders could result in very devastating consequences.
Sometime last year, the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey’, had his account hacked, which naturally raised concerns about whether any account on the platform can truly avoid being compromised. The mechanism through which that particular hack occurred was fixed by Twitter after Dorsey’s hack and there’s no reason to believe it is the same mechanism to be blamed here.
According to a campaign aide for Joe Biden, he said Twitter “locked down” his account immediately. “We remain in touch with Twitter on the matter,” the aide added.
Barack Obama’s Twitter account also appeared to be compromised as part of the broader security incident on the platform.
Regarding Bill Gates, a spokesperson said “We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.”
Asked whether it was concerned about the President’s account potentially being affected, or whether it was in touch with Twitter about the issue, the White House declined to comment.
Within a few minutes of the tweets being posted, a bitcoin account that appeared in some of them showed more than 320 transactions and had received more than $113,000.
In response to the issue, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey expressed that they felt bad about what had happened and were taking steps to have an understanding of the whole issue. He stated that; “We all feel terrible this happened, We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
The Twitter support team also stated that; “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.”
The FBI, who are aware of what happened, cautioned the public in a tweet that stated that “We are aware of today’s security incident involving several Twitter accounts belonging to high profile individuals, the accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud. We advise the public not to fall victim to this scam by sending cryptocurrency or money in relation to this incident.”
