Multiple Verified Accounts Compromised in Twitter Bitcoin Scam

Update (18/7/20): Dissecting the Twitter hack [here]

Twitter accounts of CEOs, celebrities, companies and other influential persons have been breached in arguably the biggest attack the social platform has ever seen.

The accounts were taken over by scammers tweeting requests for cryptocurrency with the promise to double payments. Many of the tweets included a partnership with CryptoForHealth.

Among the affected accounts were Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Apple and Twitter.

A number of these tweets have since been deleted and Twitter has prevented verified accounts from tweeting for a while until it is “safe to do so”.

We also limited functionality for a much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts (even those with no evidence of being compromised), while we continue to fully investigate this.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

Twitter has confirmed that is was a coordinated “social engineering attack on its employees”.

The hacker may have had access to admin tools on Twitter’s internal network, which allowed them to take control of the accounts.

Accounts that were hacked

Here is a list of high-profile accounts known to have been affected at the time:

• Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder
• Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX
• Joe Biden, former US vice president
• Warren Buffet, investor and businessman
• Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
• Wiz Khalifa, Hip-hop rapper
• Kanye West, American rapper
• Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of NYC
• Floyd Mayweather, multiple weight American boxing champion
• Uber,
• Apple,
• Cryptocurrency accounts: Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, Bitfinex and Kucoin.

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