Twitter accounts of Apple, Musk, Gates, others hit in major hack
The official Twitter accounts of Apple, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others were hijacked on Wednesday by scammers trying to dupe persons into sending cryptocurrency bitcoin, in an enormous hack.
The set of accounts commandeered simultaneously grew rapidly to add Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Uber, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, bitcoin specialty businesses and many others.
"We know about a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter," the messaging service said in a tweet.
The Biden campaign told AFP that Twitter locked down the hacked account quickly and removed the bogus tweet.
It appeared that Twitter had disabled the ability to tweet from validated accounts, people that have the state blue checkmarks.
"You may be struggling to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident," Twitter's support team said in a post.
The posts, that have been largely deleted, were fired faraway from the selection of high-profile accounts telling people they had thirty minutes to send $1,000 in bitcoin to become sent back doubly much.
"That is a SCAM, USUALLY DO NOT participate!" Gemini cryptocurrency exchange co-founder Cameron Winklevoss warned from his official account on Twitter.
"It is the same attack/takeover that other major crypto twitter accounts are experiencing. Be vigilant!"
'Giving back'
The website Blockchain.com, which monitors transactions manufactured in cryptocurrencies, said a complete of 12.58 bitcoins, worth almost $116,000, have been sent to the email addresses mentioned in the fraudulent tweets.
The tweet that appeared on Musk's Twitter feed said, "Happy Wednesday! I am giving back Bitcoin to all or any of my followers. I am doubling all payments delivered to the Bitcoin address below. You send 0.1 BTC, I send 0.2 BTC back!"
It added that the offer was "only going on for 30 minutes."
The fake messages that appeared on the accounts of other famous personalities made similar promises of instant riches.
The scammers also hacked accounts belonging to rideshare heavyweight Uber, together with those owned by bitcoin trading companies.
The account folks President Donald Trump, which includes more than 83 million followers, had not been hacked.
"Given the accounts that got hacked more recently (Apple, Uber, Gates, Musk, etc), I am now leaning towards this being an internal compromise of a Twitter system, not an API attack from a social aggregator service," bitcoin authority and author Andreas Antonopoulos said in a tweet from his @aantonop account.
Rachel Tobac of cyber-security firm Social Proof Security theorized that hackers got control of a Twitter employee's administrative access to "dominate a prominent account and tweet with the person."
A version of the scam invited persons to click on a link at which they might be exploited.
"All major crypto Twitter accounts have already been compromised," Winklevoss warned in a tweet.
Among the hacked accounts was @gemini used by the crypto-exchange, according to his twin brother and co-founder Tyler Winklevoss.
"@Gemini's twitter account, plus a number of other crypto twitter accounts, has been hacked," Tyler Winklevoss said in a tweet.
Twitter has been target by code hackers in the past.
In March 2017, the accounts of Amnesty International, the French economics ministry and the BBC's North America service were broken into by code hackers believed to have already been loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Last August, a number of insulting or racist messages were posted on the non-public account of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey without his knowledge.
Source: www.thejakartapost.com
