High-profile accounts on Twitter were hacked on Wednesday including Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Apple. Twitter believes it’s an attack on some of its employees.
What We Know:
- According to Twitter, the hackers posted tweets that deem to promote cryptocurrency scam. Twitter’s support team says, “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.”
- In addition to Joe Bide and BarackIbama, various other celebrities were also attacked include Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and Jeff Bezos. These celebrities were hacked and had tweets posted to their accounts revolving around donating via Bitcoin. Bill Gates also had a tweet poste about Bitcoin, promising to double all payments for the next 30 minutes after the tweet was posted.
- All tweets posted by the hackers have been deleted. Twitter made a statement saying, “Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers. “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.”
- An hour after the incident, Twitter prevented those who had verified accounts from tweeting, but non-verified accounts were still able to tweet. A little over three hours after the initial reports, Twitter said most of the hacked accounts had been restored. However, Twitter is still investigating what could have caused a breech in their systems. “We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.
- According to Bitcoin researcher Tim Cotton, the first Bitcoin wallet became active on Wednesday and hours after the wallet’s identification number was posted on Twitter, it received more than $100,000 worth of Bitcoin. The FBI has been added on the investigation.
The FBI’s San Francisco field office launched an investigation into the hacks and says they encourage the public not to fall for the scam by sending money or cryptocurrency. The New York State Department of Financial Services has also weighed in and there have been no updates thusfar.
