Elon Musk, Bill Gates & more hacked in massive Bitcoin scam
Bill Gates doesn’t want your Bitcoin…
On Wednesday afternoon, numerous major Twitter accounts were hacked starting with Elon Musk then moving onto Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, and more. All compromised accounts published the same message claiming Bitcoin payments sent to the included address would be doubled.
Hacker gained access to a Twitter “admin” tool in the company’s network that allowed them to hijack high-profile Twitter accounts and spread a cryptocurrency scam. Twitter closed the largest verified accounts in the US and the rest of the world.
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
Once the twitter team became aware of the incident, they immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Twitter had to take the extraordinary step of stopping many verified accounts from tweeting altogether. Password reset requests were also being denied and some other "account functions" disabled.
We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
By 8:30 EDT verified accounts were able to send tweets again, but Twitter said it was still working on a fix.
Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident. For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 17, 2020
Twitter support determined that approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident.
Hackers behind the tweets raked in at least $121,000 over 400+ transactions. Over half of the stolen total has moved to other Bitcoin addresses, one of which has been active in the past and is registered with a U.S. exchange. Twitter’s team is still working to find the culprits…
Conclusion
While Twitter users don’t typically worry about the company being hacked, this is a wake-up call for the social platform. It will happen again whether on Twitter, Instagram or, another social platform. Users should be cautious when scams involve sending money and remember that trustworthy accounts can be comprised.
Affected accounts:
Michael Bloomberg
Elon Musk
Barack Obama
Joe Biden
Warren Buffett
Jeff Bezos
Bill Gates
Kanye West
Apple
Uber
Binance
Coinbase
Coindesk
Gemini
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