Twitter accounts belonging to powerful personalities and celebrities were hacked on Wednesday by hackers who solicited for bitcoins.
Some of the Twitter accounts hacked belonged to Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Barrack Obama, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Michael Bloomberg, Apple, Uber, and Jeff Bezos.
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.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020
The hackers are said to have taken control of the accounts for several hours tweeting on behave of the owners, asking for bitcoin donations from their followers.
“I am giving back to the community. All bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled. If you send 1,000 dollars, I will send back 2,000 dollars. Am only doing this for the next 30 minutes. (Address),” read the message on each account.
Massive Twitter hack underway by Bitcoin scammers:
– Bill Gates
– Elon Musk
– Joe Biden
– Warren Buffett
– Kanye West
– Michael Bloomberg
– Apple
– Uber
– Jeff Bezos
– Barack Obama pic.twitter.com/5uSngaBdrZ— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 15, 2020
Twitter says hackers also took over several verified accounts and posted the same message. It is estimated that the hackers managed to solicit at least 100,000 dollars.
Twitter had to turn off some of the accounts as it tried to solve the problem. Some of the tweets were deleted but reposted like for the case of billionaire Elon Musk.
President Donald Trump’s account was not accessed despite several attempts to hack it according to Twitter. Twitter has promised to carry out investigations and give all the information through a series of tweets.
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.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
The incident led to shares of the giant social media platform dropping by at least 5 percent as prominent people struggled to have control of their accounts.
“We are looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or the information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it,” said Twitter.
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