In one of the most widespread cyberattacks, the Twitter accounts of major companies, celebrities and, politicians have been compromised, all for promoting a bitcoin scam that seems to be earning quite a bit of money for the creator.
The Twitter accounts of former US President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple have been hacked. Twitter has taken a drastic step in blocking new tweets from every verified user, irrespective of it being hacked or no, as well as locking the hacked accounts.
The company revealed that their internal employee tools were compromised and used in the hack, which explains why accounts with two account verification were involved in fooling followers with the Bitcoin scam.
Twitter’s acknowledgment of a “coordinated attack” on their systems
New scam tweets were being continuously posted on the compromised accounts regularly even after 4 PM ET and lasted for more than two hours. Twitter acknowledged the attack after an hour of silence at 5:45 ET. Twitter posted that they are aware of the security incident that has impacted many Twitter accounts and they are investigating and taking steps to fix the same.
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At 6 PM ET, the company took the emergency measure of preventing verified accounts from tweeting, which seems to be a drastic step that has ever been taken in their company’s history. At 7:18 PM ET, Twitter posted that they would be limiting the ability to tweet, reset passwords, and other account functionalities till they fix the issue.
At 8:41 PM ET, Twitter enabled the tweeting for verified accounts but they also mentioned that this functionality may work on and off, as they fix the issue at the back end. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey wrote that they have faced a tough day, with the attack and an ongoing investigation with the correct diagnosis of how this attack happened will be soon shared with everyone.
Prominent world leaders and major companies Twitter accounts compromised in one of the biggest security attacks
The chaos began when Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s account was compromised after which Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’s account was also compromised, and both accounts started posting tweets with an identical bitcoin wallet address. The accounts were promoting the bitcoin scam till 5:56 PM ET.
Shortly after, the accounts of Apple, Uber, former President Barack Obama, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, hip-hop start Kanye West, and former New York City mayor and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, among others, were also compromised.
This has been a never before seen cyberattack in Twitter’s history and what is most shocking is that a hack like this could run a financial scam on the accounts of prominent world leaders and companies, which could lead to devastating consequences.