Twitter has released a statement reacting to some of their high-profile accounts being hacked by Bitcoin scammers on Wednesday. The likes of Kanye West, Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos Kim Kardashian, Apple were all victim of the latest hacking.
The social media App through its support account said: “the hacking of several high-profile accounts was a “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
Twitter in their statement continued by adding that: “Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing.”
Some of the high-profile accounts on Twitter that were hijacked by a coordinated group of cryptocurrency/ Bitcoin scammers on Wednesday, includes those of Kanye West, Apple, Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Uber, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
“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,” the statement added.
The Twitter Support team subsequently said, “You may be unable to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.” Twitter had disabled verified accounts from tweeting temporarily.
The scams involved promises that users would double their money if they sent cash in the form of Bitcoin to a specific account. The hacked tweet from Bloomberg’s personal account, for example, said, “I am giving back to the community” and asked users to send $1,000 in Bitcoin to receive $2,000 back.
All the hacked accounts had similar messages, and anyone could have known that these accounts have been hacked by Bitcoin scammers with the bogus tweets. The likes of Gates, Obama, Jeff Bezos and others accounts tweeted the same thing. See a capture of the message:
Gates’ account read: “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time. I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also reacting to the hacking, tweeted
“Tough day for us at Twitter. 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.”
Other Twitter accounts targeted in the coordinated attack included Kim Kardashian West, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, YouTube creator MrBeast, Wendy’s and Cash App (a mobile payment service developed Dorsey-led Square), as well as @bitcoin, @coindesk, @coinbase and @binance, TechCrunch reported.