Twitter accounts of major personalities hijacked in massive hack
The official Twitter accounts of Apple, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others were hijacked on Wednesday by scammers trying to dupe people into sending cryptocurrency bitcoin, in an enormous hack.
The account folks President Donald Trump, which includes a lot more than 83 million followers, had not been among those hacked.
The set of accounts commandeered grew rapidly to add Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Uber, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, bitcoin specialty organizations and many others.
Twitter has been targeted 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.
“Tough day for all of us at Twitter,” leader Jack Dorsey said in a tweet.
“Most of us feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and can share everything we can when we have a far more complete understanding of precisely what happened.”
Last August, a number of insulting or racist messages were posted on the non-public account of Twitter founder Dorsey without his knowledge.
The Biden campaign told AFP that Twitter locked down the hacked account quickly and removed the bogus tweet.
Twitter disabled the ability to tweet from validated accounts, those with the state blue ticks, for about two hours while focusing on a fix.
The duplicitous posts, which were 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!”
BitTorrent leader Justin Sun is offering a $1 million reward for finding the Twitter hackers and bringing them to justice, according to media reports.
‘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 e-mail 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 thirty minutes.”
The fake messages that appeared on the accounts of other famous personalities made similar promises of instant riches.
“Given the accounts that got hacked recently (Apple, Uber, Gates, Musk, etc), I am now leaning towards this as an internal compromise of a Twitter system, no 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 SocialProof Security theorized that hackers got control of a Twitter employee’s administrative usage of “dominate a prominent account and tweet with the person.”
“All major crypto Twitter accounts have already been compromised,” Winklevoss warned in a tweet.
